Taking a look around

I wasn't out of touch with the world during our time away, just off the 'Net for most of that time—but reading mediocre newspapers (which most of them are) and catching the occasional cable news show (sometimes with the sound off) doesn't exactly give one a full-orbed view of current events; and then the first part of this week, I've been busy and occupied with other things, so it's only been today that I've started to catch up a bit with the political news.

It's interesting to see that Gov. Palin has pretty much gone mano a mano with President Obama over health care, defining the terms of the debate with her Facebook posts—to such an extent that even non-Palinites within the GOP are acknowledging that she's taken the leadership of the party—and judging by the poll numbers, the Obama administration's fixation on her, the recent market gains made by health insurers, and the decision of the Senate Finance Committee to drop consultations on end-of-life care from its version of the bill, it seems clear that she's winning. Given that her op-ed on the cap-and-tax bill was a hammer blow to its political prospects, it would seem that Gov. Palin's leadership has had a significant effect on the Obama administration's legislative agenda.

Perhaps the most unnerving thing to happen during the last week or two was the White House's decision to invite people to report on friends and neighbors who are opposed to Obamacare—something which doesn't surprise me all that much, given the pattern of behavior shown by Barack Obama and his coterie, but which is nevertheless concerning; on the bright side, at least it inspired a vintage effort from the redoubtable Mark Steyn in response.

As a result of all this, the polls aren't being very kind to the president or his party. New Jersey is turning on his policies (and seems likely to put a Republican in the statehouse this fall), while Rasmussen is showing voters favoring the GOP on health care (and in fact on nearly every other issue as well) and the president's approval ratings continuing to drop (just 47% approve, only 29% strongly, while 52% disapprove, including 65% of independents; on the bright side, only 37% strongly disapprove).

On a brighter note, it looks like our government has lost some of the bank bailout money:

Although hundreds of well-trained eyes are watching over the $700 billion that Congress last year decided to spend bailing out the nation's financial sector, it's still difficult to answer some of the most basic questions about where the money went.

Nice job, guys. That's definitely the sort of thing to make people think twice about giving the feds even more money to play with. And in the meantime, as the government's left trying to clean up the mess made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, here comes their cousin Ginnie Mae to make a whole new one. Startlingly, Congress doesn't see anything wrong with this (though if Ginnie Mae does indeed crash, they will no doubt look for some way to blame it on George W. Bush).

On the foreign policy front, the Marines have launched a major assault in Afghanistan; the incomparable Michael Yon reports (if you can get the video to work; I always have trouble with PJTV). I wish them well, but no foreign power has ever really won in Afghanistan, and I'm not confident we'll be the first. (This, btw, was the problem with Senator Obama's insistence that Iraq was the wrong war, that we should have been fighting in Afghanistan; fighting in Iraq drew al'Qaeda down from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts and streets of Iraq, where we could actually get at them.)

All this is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of everything the president has to keep track of; and all we expect of our presidents is that they keep track of all of it and know what to do about all of it. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for them . . . if it weren't for the fact that they did everything possible to put themselves in that position.

When we say God works in mysterious ways . . .

. . . this is the kind of thing we mean. I tend to think that there are folks out there through whom God decides to work in absolutely atypical ways, both because of who he's made them to be and so that their lives would serve as reminders to the rest of us that he is in no wise limited to our conventional expectations or conventional wisdom; Tyler Dawn, I think, is one of those people. From my contact with her (all electronic, alas), I can say that she's a remarkable woman of God with a remarkable faith who doesn't fit any pattern any church I've ever run across would consider to be normal; that's just her, and that's just God. In this case, she has an amazing testimony of how God used her—through a series of hard and unpleasant and painful things—to expose a child molester and set a child free.

Go read it, and marvel at the hand of God; and after you've marveled a while, remember that what God's on about in our lives is often something very different from what we're on about, and in many cases something we can't even see, because we don't see the whole picture. What we think is the "A" plot of our lives right now might only really be a minor sub-plot, while God is at work telling a completely different story—and what is abject defeat in one might well be glorious victory in the other. Just as it was, as Tyler Dawn points out, for Joseph.

Fortunate defeat

I was there when they crucified my Lord;
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword.
I threw the dice when they pierced his side,
But I've seen love conquer the great divide.

—U2/B. B. King, "When Love Comes to Town"

OK, so I was on a bit of a U2 kick this trip. I still think this is a great lyric, and something every Christian ought to be able to sing full-throated, with a full heart.

For those not familiar with this video, it's not primarily a music video of the song—it's as much about Bono, B. B., the rest of the band, and the making of the song itself as it is about the song—but it's interesting anyway.

God rocks

Since this is sort of Jared Wilson Day around these parts, it seems like a good time to note a superb little post of his from this past Monday. In dealing with the silly question "Can God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?" he said something very interesting, taking the question from an angle that had never occurred to me before and producing a truly profound response.

The truth is that God did make a weight so heavy he couldn't lift it. He did so not by building an immovable force—we did that with our sin—but by incarnating the frailty of humanity and willingly subjecting himself to the force. As one of us, yet still himself, he created the conundrum of the incarnate God, bearing a cross he both ordained yet could not carry by himself, becoming condemned in death and also victorious. And God was crushed according to the plan he himself projected from the foundation of the world.

So, can God make a rock so heavy even he can't lift it?

Yes. And he did. For three days only. And then he drop kicked it out of the mouth of the tomb.

Brilliant.

What I still haven't found

I believe in the Kingdom Come,
Then all the colours will bleed into one,
Bleed into one;
But yes, I'm still running.
You broke the bonds,
You loosed the chains,
You carried the cross and
All my shame,
All my shame;
You know I believe it.

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

—U2, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"

I don't want to get into the argument about what U2 themselves mean by this song. According to the Wikipedia article, "both Bono and Edge have . . . called it a gospel song on numerous occasions," and I have no reason to doubt that; I've seen other sites assert that they have repeatedly called it a song of "spiritual yearning," which seems obvious enough, though I've never seen any original source for either of these attributions. At the same time, reading around the 'Net, it's clear that a lot of U2 fans don't want to believe that the song's about anything of the sort, and they're entitled to their own opinions.

My interest at the moment, though, is rather different; if you wanted to be technical, I suppose you could say that I'm setting aside questions of authorial intent and opting for a bit of reader-response criticism. To wit, it occurred to me as I was listening to this song on the way home Monday that whatever U2 means by this song, it serves quite well as an apt expression of our experience of the process of sanctification (or of mine, at least). I believe all those things, too—and yet I would have to confess that in some ways, at least, I too am still running. There are still areas where I resist what God desires to do in my life, and areas in which I follow him determinedly until the temptation gets too tempting, at which point I run off like any other dumb sheep convinced that the grass over there really must be tastier. (Only to find out when I get there, as always, that the "grass" is really only extra-long Astroturf.)

I believe it all, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for—not in God, but in me, and in my own life. I haven't found the trust, the submission, the willingness to follow faithfully; I've found the peace of God, but not the contentment to rest in it, and the joy of God, but not the single-mindedness to stay in it, instead of jumping off to go check out other things to see if they might be better. I've found the beauty of the gospel and the glorious blessing of the grace of God, but not the ability to wholeheartedly trust that they are for me. I preach it, I preach it constantly, but I do so as much as anything because I know I need to hear it, because I haven't found it in me to fully believe it. Not yet.

But by the grace of God, I know I will—not by my efforts, but by his gift. His grace doesn't depend on me, one way or the other; and whether I can always fully believe it or not, I know he who promised is faithful, and will do it. And for that I give thanks.

Your Jesus is too safe

It's a great pleasure to participate in the blog tour for Jared Wilson's book Your Jesus Is Too Safe: Outgrowing a Drive-Thru, Feel-Good Savior—though I must confess that the term "blog tour" gives me an image of a truly strange-looking trolley rolling along the infobahn, dinging merrily away, with a disembodied voice gravely intoning, "Next stop . . ." None of which, of course, has anything to do with the book.

Full disclosure: I've known Jared Wilson as a blogger and blog correspondent (for lack of a better term) for a couple years now, I had the privilege of meeting him in person and spending a little time with him at GCNC this past April, and I consider him a friend. I like and respect him a great deal.

Truth behind full disclosure: none of that affects my review of his book. If anything, it's the other way around—this book captures much of the reason why I like and respect Jared. When Ed Stetzer begins the foreword by declaring, "The pages you are about to read are an antidote," he's right; and it's an antidote that far too much of the American church badly needs.

An antidote to what? To the legalistic no-gospel that fills so much of the American church—conservative as well as liberal; some of the worst offenders consider themselves "evangelical"—and our convenient, comfortable, sanitized, commoditized caricatures of Jesus, all precisely designed to meet our felt needs. As Jared says, our culture is plenty familiar with Postcard Jesus, Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Buddy Jesus, ATM Jesus, Role Model Jesus, and Therapeutic Jesus, and many Christians are thrilled when some famous person or other gives thanks to Grammy Award Speech Jesus; but the real Jesus, the Jesus we find in Scripture, is an altogether unfamiliar figure, because all too many churches aren't preaching him. After all, he makes us uncomfortable, and he makes the world uncomfortable, and that's no way to grow a church, now, is it?

To this kind of thinking, Jared offers his book as an antidote, driven by the love of Christ and the provocation of the Spirit of God. As he writes (239-40),

The passion of my life is the scandalous gospel of God's amazing grace in Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit cultivated this passion in me through the Scriptures, in which I see Jesus chastised and criticized for proclaiming the gospel by eating with sinners and giving himself to sinners. My encouragement to you—my call to you—is to partake of that gospel, to acknowledge and confess and believe that you are a sinner in need of God's grace, and that Jesus Christ died and rose to manifest that grace to you, and that you can't live without Jesus. You cannot do it.

That is the sort of thing that ought to be the lifeblood of every Christian and the heartbeat of every church . . . and it isn't. It isn't because we don't take our sin seriously enough, and we don't take Jesus seriously enough. The purpose of this book is to change that, for those who have ears to hear.

To do this, Jared presents what he calls twelve portraits of Jesus, looking at Christ from twelve different angles, through a dozen different lenses. He considers:

• Jesus the Promise

• Jesus the Prophet

• Jesus the Forgiver

• Jesus the Man

• Jesus the Shepherd

• Jesus the Judge

• Jesus the Redeemer

• Jesus the King

• Jesus the Sacrifice

• Jesus the Provision

• Jesus the Lord

• Jesus the Savior

Some of these sound familiar to American ears, while others are quite strange (I can imagine readers asking "Jesus the Provision? What does he mean by that?"); but the truth is that even the familiar ones have been trimmed and tamed, made safe and non-threatening and altogether nice, in the teaching of far too much of the church in this culture. Not to put too fine a point on it, far too many of us in this country aren't Christians at all but idolators, worshiping a Jesus of our own invention who is nicely tuned to tell us just what we want to hear. In response, Jared sets out to open our eyes to what it really means that Jesus was a fully human adult male, or that he is the King of Kings. In so doing, he will no doubt make a lot of folks very, very uncomfortable—but it's a holy discomfort, the evidence of the Spirit of God at work.

In painting his portraits of Jesus, Jared draws heavily on Scripture, as he should; this is a book filled with biblical quotations, and not just single verses, but whole passages. Of course, there are plenty of books out there which quote a lot of Scripture and then proceed to misuse it, but that isn't a problem here; one of the chief qualities of the book is its careful attention to what Scripture is actually saying, and its author's clear determination to follow wherever the word of God leads and let the chips fall where they may. Rather than using the Bible to make his points, he has sought to place himself under the Bible and its authority, and thus to say only what it says.

This is not to say, however, that he has produced a book which is disconnected from life as we know it; quite the contrary. The academic foundation is clearly there, but this is no theoretical discussion; it is, rather, a profoundly practical book—or perhaps we might say, following G. K. Chesterton, that it is a profoundly unpractical book in all the right ways. Chesterton has one of his characters, the poet and painter Gabriel Gale, offer to help a man who has attempted suicide, explaining his offer with these words:

I am no good at practical things, and you have got beyond practical things.

What you want is an unpractical man. . . . What can practical men do here? Waste their practical time in running after the poor fellow and cutting him down from one pub sign after another? Waste their practical lives watching him day and night, to see that he doesn't get hold of a rope or a razor? Do you call that practical? You can only forbid him to die. Can you persuade him to live? Believe me, that is where we come in. A man must have his head in the clouds and his wits wool-gathering in fairyland, before he can do anything so practical as that.

Chesterton was right: the practical counsels of this world can only forbid people to die (or, more ominously, order them to die); they cannot persuade people to live, much less tell them how. That is for unpractical people, for those who have given their lives over to the unpractical mendicant teacher from Nazareth, and in so doing have learned how to live; and to illustrate that, Jared offers a number of stories of just what that unpractical life looks like. Some, like the story of the Amish of Quarryville, PA who forgave the man who murdered their daughters, are widely known; others, like the story of his cousins Steve and LaVonne Jones and their son Colton (which, as a father of three, wrenched at my heart), are not. All bear witness to the truth that it's only in the real Jesus Christ, not any of the more "practical" or "useful" versions of him that we invent, that we find real life.

The tone of this book is informal and conversational, at times snarky and sarcastic (though the bulk of that is to be found among its copious and entertaining footnotes), and occasionally slangy; some, at least of older generations, may find that off-putting at points. In general, however, I don't think any but the most formal of readers will find it a true problem, while younger folks in particular will likely find the tone attractive and appealing. Taken as a whole, I believe the conversational tone is a benefit to the book, for a couple reasons.

One, it suits the author; I don't have any way of knowing if attempting to write in a more formal style would have made him sound stuffy and pedantic, but writing in this vein makes it clear that he is anything but. That's disarming, which is a good thing; given that he's calling his readers to set aside our comfortable Jesuses for one who will challenge us and make us very uncomfortable with ourselves, the natural response from many will be to look for a reason to reject that call. Many will no doubt find reasons, but branding Jared as stuffy and out of touch won't be one of them.

Two, the book's tone serves to reinforce the point that its message is for all of us, and all of life. Following Christ isn't just about doing formal things for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but it's about how we're supposed to live all the rest of the time, too; it has to do with cracks about old teen movies and popular fiction just as much as with the sorts of things we think of as "spiritual."

The great risk Jared took with this book—one which he himself acknowledges—is that in looking at Jesus from twelve different perspectives, he might have "inadvertently propose[d] twelve different Jesuses, creating intellectual confusion where the purpose has been to enhance clarity." I think, though, that he has avoided that quite successfully by tracing one strong theme through all twelve chapters: "the great unifying presence of the gospel." This is the hub of which the twelve perspectives are spokes, as he lays out in the conclusion of the twelfth chapter (280):

The good news is that Jesus Christ is not just God with us, but he's also God for us. For us, he is the promise of fulfillment, the prophet of truth, the forgiver of sins, the man of sorrows, the good shepherd, the righteous judge, the redeemer, the reigning king, the atoning sacrifice, the all-sufficient provision, the almighty God, and the rescuer of the lost. He is all these things and more, but none of this is good news if he is not also the Lord and the Savior of sinners in need of grace.

Today is the day of salvation. The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe.

If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Jared Wilson has written a book that is full of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that shines the light of that gospel from every page, and that I believe will call many in this country to that gospel for the first time. It is a book for the reconversion of the church, and for the conversion of many who are outside the church because they've rejected our false Jesuses, not knowing that the real Jesus is someone altogether different. It's a book we need to read, not because Jared is wonderful, but because Jesus is wonderful, and Jared is talking about Jesus. It is, in short, a book for which we can honestly say, "Thank you, God."

Seen on a billboard

along US 30 in rural Pennsylvania west of Pittsburgh—two-panel, comic-strip style, a slice of a conversation between two characters. One says to the other, "What do you mean, I can't take a joke? I took you." (The quote may not be completely exact in the first few words, but the rest stuck firmly in my brain.)

I wasn't in a position to stop and look closely at the billboard, and the way the road was winding, I didn't get a long look at it, so I have no idea who put it up, or why, or what their purpose was; whatever their reason, that's an extraordinarily cruel line, in my humble opinion. It appears that what I saw is part of a larger campaign, because I saw a different two-panel comic-strip billboard in my rear-view mirror later on—I have no idea what it said, though, so it doesn't bring me any closer to knowing what these billboards are about.

All of this has left me curious. I tried Googling the first billboard I saw, but with no result. Does anybody know anything about these billboards and their purpose?

Oh, now this would give my children ideas

New adventures with Slip'n'Slides . . .

As Bill says, I don't know if this is real or faked, but if it's real, it's amazing.

Note on the past week

If anyone wondered about the radio silence around here the last several days, you may be assured that I haven't run out of things to say (not that anyone who knows me would consider that likely); rather, we were on vacation in Pennsylvania and found ourselves unexpectedly without Internet access for most of the week. I had the chance to spend time with dear friends, see Gettysburg for the first time, and go to the wedding of one good friend from college—and even, unexpectedly, to participate: the minister, at the prompting of the Holy Spirit, invited all pastors present to come up and lay hands on the couple for the prayer of blessing. It was a wonderful moment in perhaps the best wedding I've ever seen. (I can't speak for my own, though I love the pastors who married us dearly—I was too busy getting married to absorb much of what was going on.) Leaving my own wedding aside, I don't think I've ever seen a more joyful bride, or felt happier for a wedding couple.

I have to say, too, if there's a template for what a truly gospel-driven wedding ceremony looks like, that had to be it, or pretty close. If you happen to be looking for a gospel-driven church in Pittsburgh, I can recommend Bellefield Presbyterian without question or hesitation; just from the wedding ceremony, I can say with complete assurance that the pastor there, the Rev. Dr. R. Geoffrey Brown, is a man of God who glories, delights, exults, revels in the gospel of Jesus Christ and proclaims it with deep joy and humility. He and his wife are also wonderful people—of that much I have no doubt, even from my brief contact with them. It was a true joy and blessing to be a part of that worshipping community this past Saturday.

The underlying problem

Christians voiced anger and dismay Tuesday after a Bible, which was part of an exhibition inviting viewers to add their reflections, was defaced with offensive and foul-mouthed scrawl.

Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art has decided to put the Bible in a glass case after the exhibit, called Untitled 2009 and part of a show entitled Made In God's Image, was vandalised.

Artist Jane Clarke, a minister at the Metropolitan Community Church, asked visitors to annotate the Bible with stories and reflections, as a way of making it more inclusive.

But visitors to the gallery took the invitation a bit further than she had anticipated. . . .

On the first page of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, someone had written: "I am Bi, Female and Proud. I want no god who is disappointed in this."

It's a pretty predictable story, really; Clarke appears to have been surprised by what happened, but that only shows her to be severely naive. She's quoted as saying, "I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art," but that was never going to be the universal response, for reasons which the response I quoted above shows.

Most people, when they read the comment written on the first page of that Bible, will focus on sexuality; but the truth is, whatever you think of homosexuality and the biblical teaching about it, that's not the most significant issue here. Whether this woman's homosexual practices are sinful or not, her comment shows her to be guilty of a greater sin—indeed, the greatest of all sins—that of idolatry. She's made it very clear what her real god is: her sexuality. All other claims on her allegiance are measured against that one; she's willing to worship other gods as well, to add other deities to her personal pantheon, but only if they are content to serve her chief god.

And the Lord of creation, the God of the universe, won't do that. He will never do that. He claims our absolute obedience and allegiance, and he will not share his glory with another—and that's why so many people resist him. That's the root of our objections to God, that he insists on being our only god, calling us to give up all competing loyalties and affections; and there are many who are unwilling to do so. If the church is going to reach out in any intelligent way, it has to start by realizing that fact. As Tim Keller says, we cannot effectively preach the gospel without naming and addressing the idols of our culture and our people.

HT: the Rev. Wayne Paul Barrett, who referenced this in his sermon yesterday at Delmont Presbyterian Church. (My apologies for initially failing to note this.)

Sin and pleasure

One of the biggest lies the Devil sells us is that sinning brings pleasure. To be sure, it’s an effective lie, because it’s true in the short term—but the long term is a different story. The Devil’s aim isn’t to give us good things, but to deprive us of good things, or rather to talk us into depriving ourselves of good things. That might seem like a strange thing to say, when so many people’s idea of Christian living is “thou shalt not do anything fun”—but it’s the truth. Despite what some might think, God is the one who created pleasure, and he’s the one who wants you to live a really good life; Satan, by contrast, might use pleasure to get you hooked, but his ultimate goal is to deprive you of everything worth having. Just look at drug addiction—the real pleasure, the real fun, is all in the beginning; after a while, all that’s left is desperation, craving and need.

That’s the pattern of sin, and the pattern Satan wants to get people into—the minimum pleasure necessary for the maximum slavery; and whatever they might think themselves to be doing, even if they proclaim themselves agents of liberation, that’s ultimately the end that all the false teachers of this world serve. By contrast, the Christian faith calls us back to see the true goodness of God, and the true goodness of all that he made, through the deception and confusion of all this world’s counterfeit versions. He calls us to see the true goodness of marriage through the counterfeits of free love, hooking up, and whatever else this world can spin out there; to see the true goodness of food through all the ways we misuse it; to see the true goodness of all the things God has made through all the ways we abuse them. When we treat this as anything less than his good creation—whether by rejecting it, by worshiping it, or by treating it as merely something to exploit—we dishonor God, we distort his truth, and we do ourselves grievous harm.

(Adapted from “Led Astray”)

Accepted on a journey

Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you;
go, and from now on sin no more.”

—John 8:10-11 (ESV)

As they were going along the road, someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” And Jesus said to him, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Yet another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.” Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

—Luke 9:57-62 (ESV)

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.

—Luke 18:22-23 (ESV)

People like to talk about Christ accepting everybody and forget that the acceptance of Christ is not a thing that says to us, “I'm fine with you just the way you are; you just keep doing what you're doing.” The acceptance of Christ, rather, says to us, “Go and sin no more.”

He says to us, “I love you just the way you are—but too much to let you stay that way.”

He says to us, “You're all messed up, but I love you anyway; that's why I'm going to change you from the inside out.”

He says to us, “Give up your life—give up your plans, your desires, your ideas of how things should be—and I'll give you something better.”

Jesus doesn't call us to stay where and what we are because he's not much of one for staying in one place; he calls us to follow. He calls us to a journey, and a relationship, and like any journey and any meaningful relationship, that means change. It means leaving things behind, and getting new things in return.

And yes, that includes the things of which we say, “God couldn't possibly want me to give that up; he can't possibly mean that I'm not allowed to do that.” In fact, it especially includes those things, because those—whether sinful in and of themselves or not—are the things in our lives that most interfere with his lordship: they are our idols. They are the things which which we must give over to him if we're to follow him; clinging to them is nothing less than idolatry.

And yes, that includes our sexuality—and that means for all of us. He may give it back to us in pretty much the same form, or he may not; he's been calling people to celibacy for a very long time, after all, for a great many reasons. But whether straight or gay, married or single, our sexuality absolutely must be surrendered to his lordship in our lives if we're to follow Jesus faithfully; and that may very well mean accepting that we cannot do that which we most want to do, and which we're most accustomed to doing.

And yes, that includes our money, and our careers, and our other family relationships, and our gifts and talents and aspirations, and all the other things that matter to us. He calls us to surrender to him everything of significance in our lives, to do with as he will. This is not the price of his acceptance, but its consequence; it's what it means to be accepted by Jesus, because to be accepted by him is to be invited to go with him, to go where he's going and do what he's doing, instead of going where we want to go and doing what we want to do.

xkcd on the Gates situation

just because it's funny:

Character is who you are when you're not thinking about it

Remember, as you think about this photo, that Barack Obama considers Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. a friend, and is comfortable enough with him to call him "Skip."

It speaks well for Sgt. Jim Crowley that he's solicitous of Professor Gates, helping him down the steps; I think it also speaks well of Dr. Gates, that he seems completely comfortable accepting Sgt. Crowley's help. It seems clear that they've made their peace, and that's good. It does not speak well of the president that he strides on ahead, oblivious.

By way of comparison, here's Barack Obama's predecessor with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who was neither a close personal friend nor a political ally:

I believe the contrast between these two pictures captures something real and significant about the contrast between these two men.

HT: Thomas Lifson, via Whitney Zahnd

The real bigotry of Gatesgate

isn’t racism, but classism—not black vs. white but elite vs. ordinary barbarian. Michael Barone captures this well in his Examiner piece from yesterday when he writes,

When Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.

Gates had much less to lose. His foolish mouthing off—in street talk, for goodness sake—at worst would get him a couple of hours in jail, as it did. That’s unpleasant, but even before being hauled off he could see a more-than-offsetting benefit: this could be the subject or the jumping off point for his next television documentary! Crowley had the power to put Gates in jail for a few hours, but not much else.

Gates, on the other hand, had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being. Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.

This accounts well for something that rather surprised me: the swiftness and unflinching conviction with which Sgt. Crowley’s colleagues and the officials of his union stood up for him and stood behind him. I would have expected some of them to try to curry favor with Professor Gates, Harvard, the mayor of Cambridge, and the president, in the face of the radioactive allegation of racism—but none of them did. I think Barone’s right, that they recognized the real bigotry in the Gates-Crowley encounter, and though they didn’t play the victim, they weren’t willing to knuckle under to it, either.

As Barone put it, they refused to let “a Harvard swell . . . destroy one of their peers . . . on a totally specious basis for his own fun and profit.” Good on them. I don’t imagine there are a lot of Palinites on the Cambridge, MA police force—but they clearly have their fair share of strong, proud ordinary barbarians, and that’s a profoundly good thing.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The buck stops . . . somewhere else

A couple days ago I noted the disconcerting failure of leadership (disconcerting to Democrats, anyway) shown so far by the president on the health care bill, which is after all one of his signature initiatives; I found it puzzling. Yesterday, Michael Barone offered an explanation that makes sense, and one that dovetails with something I've written before: Barack Obama isn't leading the legislative process because he doesn't know how. And why should he? He's never done it. He's had the title of a legislator, but he's never really been one.

He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he's never done much work putting legislation together—especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people's lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year—the stimulus, cap and trade, health care—the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.

The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn't. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn't. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or to insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn't—and it still hasn't made this basic policy choice.

I worried, during the campaign, about electing someone with no real record of substantive accomplishment—someone who knew how to talk about ideas but not how to realize them, who had no real experience getting things done; now, I think, we're seeing the fruit of that. When his agenda runs into trouble, all he knows how to do to push it forward is talk; that's why, as Politico's Carol Lee pointed out,

He’s been in office only six months, but already there’s a strong sense of déjà vu around the way Americans are seeing and hearing from President Barack Obama.

The president keeps returning to the same communications tactics over and over, and all the pages of his PR playbook have one thing in common: a big dose of Obama.

His prime-time news conference Wednesday night, one of the standbys, brings his total to four. That’s the same number that George W. Bush did—in eight years as president.

To be fair to President Obama, he is handicapped by having to work with Nancy Pelosi, who's proving a remarkably, perhaps historically, ineffective Speaker of the House. But every leader has to work with and rely on lieutenants who are less than they ought to be; effective leaders get the most out of those folks that they can and try to avoid putting them in a position where they can derail things. So far, anyway, that's not Barack Obama. I've been saying that he's a smart man and he's bound to figure it out, but so far, he hasn't; so far, all he's managed to do is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can't spell "president" without "PR"—and he has the diminishing returns to prove it.

Not fair?

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 9
Q. But doesn't God do us an injustice
by requiring in his law
what we are unable to do?

A. No, God created humans with the ability to keep the law.¹
They, however, tempted by the devil,²
      in reckless disobedience,³
      robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.⁴

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

Jerome De Jong writes (35-36),

After having considered the greatness and the extent of man's sinfulness, disobedience and wretchedness, the Catechism concludes this division on human guilt by suggesting three possible objections. . . .

The initial objection concerns the Creator himself. Is not God unjust? . . . Is it right for God to require what man cannot do? But what is it really that God requires—a series of regulations and commandments and ordinances? Let us remind ourselves again that the entire law is summarized in one word: love! If man now has become a sinner, must God now say that it is no longer necessary for the sinner to love him? Of course not; God remains the same. His requirements do not change. But supposing this to be correct, can man fulfill the requirements of the law? The answer is No, but the answer was Yes! God created man able to perform and to do all the good pleasure of God. But Adam deliberately turned his back on God and disobeyed.

Dr. De Jong elaborates on this with the example of a contractor who agrees to build a home, then takes the money for materials and spends it on a drinking binge; he asks, reasonably enough,

Is it unjust for the original party to demand that his home be built? Can the contractor claim immunity because of his weak character? The contractor was given the means with which to build the house and willfully squandered them.

To be sure, as Kuyvenhoven admits (32), this doesn't exhaust our objections on this point:

Still, we bristle in self-defense: That temptation happened . . . millennia ago. Why should we be doomed for what none of us remembers?

Here again, it's a matter of perspective. We protest like individualists. But the Bible says that the very fact that we are able to think of ourselves as unrelated, disunited individuals presents evidence of our sinful perspective. God's revelation views the human race not as a pile of gravel but as a giant tree. We are not pebbles thrown together but twigs and branches on a tree, all organically united.

We form a corporate unity. In many respects you and I have never doubted it. The national debts . . . are your and my debts. Yet when the debts were incurred, some of us were not yet born and none of us were asked. Similarly, the debt of the human race is yours and mine.

It's an interesting illustration, since nobody really does deny our liability for the national debt; perhaps it's because the corporate unity represented by the nation is visible, tangible, and human-created. It's a reminder that, however hard we may try to avoid the fact, our responsibility in life goes beyond merely that for which we want to admit responsibility.

A good piece on Obamacare

from a former president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Daniel Johnson Jr.: Memo to My Fellow Physicians: We Have Reached the Moment of Truth. It's well worth your time, because he knows what he's talking about and doesn't hesitate to call a spade a spade; I found his thumbnail history of the debate over nationalized health care particularly interesting. Here's an excerpt:

Now, with elderly, poor, women, and children covered, all that is left is a segment of the population outside of those groups that is reasonably self-sufficient and most of which has private insurance. Those folks will be forced into government coverage because of a “public option” plan that all intellectually honest observers, including both proponents and opponents of single payer, realize is a Trojan horse for a Canadian-style single-payer system. Once private insurance is crowded out by the unfair competitive tactics of the federal government intruding into an already flawed marketplace, it will be a simple matter to consolidate all of these different groups into one single entity.

What does this mean to physicians and their patients? “Clinical effectiveness research,” when operated by government instead of the medical profession, will become “cost effectiveness” restrictions on what care is available and to whom—determined by the federal government. It will only be a matter of a short time before Americans will enjoy the pleasures of “quality adjusted life years” wherein people my age will be denied services from which they might benefit because of their age and/or some other infirmity.

We don’t have to make this stuff up: It is already the law of the land in some other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, and has been long advocated here in the U.S. by voices from the left, including major media outlets. The federal government will exert total control over payment for all medical services.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine what will happen when the payment-control mechanisms used by Medicare are extended to the entire private sector. The occasional inability of Medicare patients to find physicians who are willing to provide for their needed care at a loss will become the standard experience when the cost shortfall can no longer be shifted to the private sector.

Practicing physicians in the U.S. have become accustomed to the continued availability of ever better diagnostic and treatment innovations created by our academic and research colleagues. In my own specialty field of diagnostic imaging, the pace and breadth of scientific innovation to help us help clinicians be more effective in the management of sick and injured individuals or in the early detection of life-threatening illness, such as breast cancer, has been amazing. Yet I remember only too well the mid 1970s when the federal government and all but two states (Nebraska and Louisiana) did everything in their power to deny the American people access to the technology of computed tomography because of cost. As sure as the night follows the day, we will see that same kind of limitation imposed, but on a much larger scale. But in contrast to the ’70s, total federal control will prevent physicians and patients from overcoming the stricture as we were able to do back then.

Read the whole thing, and remember, this man is a good doctor: take his diagnosis and prescriptions seriously.

HT: Shane Vander Hart

A few further notes on the "Obama-Antichrist" tripe

Much easier to do this back in my office with my books to hand, so I can add a few things to my post last night.

One, the plural of bamah in Isaiah 14:14—to which the person who did the video refers in order to justify his back-translation of bamah—is indeed bamatey; or better, bāmātê, since the yodh there isn't functioning as a consonant but rather as a vowel marker. (Actually, the root word should really be written bāmâ, since the closing hē isn't really a consonant either, but also just a vowel marker.)

Two, now that I've had the chance to sit down with the New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis (NIDOTTE to its friends), I can say with confidence that this conjectured back-translation is completely wrongheaded. The word bāmâ is used in several places in the OT in the stereotyped phrase "to tread/ride on the heights of," as NIDOTTE says, "to express God's absolute sovereignty over land and sea"; Isaiah puts this phrase in the mouth of the king of Babylon to express his arrogant presumption. The word is never used to denote Heaven, the place where God dwells, however, and never would have been, since the primary meaning of bāmâ was a place of worship (the "high places" that the kings of Israel/Judah are criticized throughout the middle OT for not taking down); the word for "heights" that is used in this way is mārôm. Besides, if Jesus had used bāmâ, we wouldn't have to guess, since it actually passed into NT Greek in the form bēma.

Instead, looking at the semantic field, the word Jesus would have actually used would have been šāmayim (or its Aramaic cognate), which is the word that actually means "heaven" (it's paralleled with other words that mean "height," "sky," "firmament," etc., but those words aren't used by themselves to mean "heaven"). As such, even kībārāq min-ûbāmātê, as little as that sounds like "Barack Obama," is clearly not what Jesus actually said; the likeliest back-translation of the words "I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven" into Hebrew, rather, would be hāzâ (or rā'â) ha-śātān kībārāq min-vešāmayim.

All of which is to say, the idea that Jesus said "I saw Satan as Barack Obama" is utterly unsupported by the facts, and unsustainable on the basis of any real understanding of Hebrew; it's contemptible nonsense to fool the credulous and pre-deceived, nothing more.

Update: Shane VanderHart's post on this on his blog, Caffeinated Thoughts, is also well worth checking out, as he adds some good points.

UPDATED: This can only make serious conservatives look bad

Ordinarily, I just ignore things like this; but for some reason, this idiot really irks me. (HT: Allahpundit)

This guy doesn't even fall into the "knows just enough Hebrew to be dangerous" category, because he doesn't actually know any Hebrew at all—or, indeed, much of anything about Hebrew. For all his pompous statement "I will report the facts. You can decide," he's precious short on facts and long on false assertions. Watch the video if you want to, and then let's go through it, if you're interested. (If you aren't, don't bother to click "Read More," just scroll down to the next post.)

One: "Aramaic is the most ancient form of Hebrew." That's about like calling French the most ancient form of Portuguese. Aramaic isn't a form of Hebrew, it's a different language—closely related, another Northwest Semitic language, but a different language.

Two: he relies on back-translations, which are necessarily conjectural, but presents them as if they were proven fact. Sloppy. Very sloppy.

Three: barack is the Arabic cognate of Hebrew barak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; "Barak" is the name of Deborah's general). Barak means "he blesses" or "he kneels"; the word baruch, which we also know as a name, means "blessed" and is the noun form of this verb. Baraq may sound the same, but it's a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qoph instead of beth-resh-kaph); the similarity in sound is meaningless, nothing but a red herring.

Four: the person who made this video is clearly unaware that the Hebrew alphabet does not have any vowels. During the post-biblical period a group of scholars called the Masoretes added pointing (a system of dots) to indicate vowels, to preserve the reading of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these are not original to the text. A couple consonants, yodh and vav, were used in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels (hē was also used this way at the end of words, much as we end words with "-ah" and "-oh"); the Masoretes included notations in their pointing system to indicate when these consonants were being, essentially, used as vowels.

Five: even if bamah (or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used in Luke 10:18, as this video suggests, it would have been plural, not singular, and quite different in form (bamatey, I think; I don't have my language tools with me at the moment, and Hebrew was never my strong suit).

Six: the individual who did this video declares, "the Hebrew letter waw [or vav] is often transliterated as a 'U.' Some scholars use the 'O' for this transliteration. It is primarily used as a conjunction to join concepts together."

This is wrong.

As I noted above, one of the ways in which Hebrew used the vav (and also the yodh and the he) was to indicate certain vowels; when the Masoretes came along to add vowel pointing to help people know how to pronounce the text, they came up with special points to indicate when, say, vav was being used as a "u" (sureq) or an "o" (holem-vav), as opposed to when it was simply a consonantal "v." (The technical term for those is matres lectiones, or "mothers of reading.") It is incorrect to say that vav "is often transliterated as a 'u'," and still more incorrect to say that 'o' is a different transliteration used by "some scholars." Rather, sometimes when the consonant vav is in the text, it's serving as a "u," and sometimes it's serving as an "o." However, this is different from the use of vav in the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefix ve-.

Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that before beth, mem, and pe, the conjunction changes from ve to a sureq, becoming a "u" sound, which is no doubt what the person behind this video is trying, however ineptly, to say. Again, though, "heights" is plural, and so even if his assumption that bamah underlies the Greek text is correct, it would not be in the singular form bamah, but in a plural form.

Thus, it is simply wrong to assert that Jesus, in talking about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, would have said ubama; it's wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamah to denote heaven, which is unproven. Thus, the last name of our president isn't in the text of Luke 10:18 in any way. As for our president's first name, while Jesus might have said baraq, that's not the same as barak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn't say, "I saw Satan fall lightning heaven," but "like lightning from heaven"—there's a preposition before, and another one in the middle, and rest assured the one in the middle isn't "Hussein." It would be, rather, the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrew min-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefix ki-.

As such, the closest to "Barack Obama" that Jesus could have spoken would have been something like kibaraq min-ubamatey . . . and that just isn't good enough to support this farrago of nonsense that Jesus told us that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

Update: I've added a few key points to this argument here. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.

The disease of political hatred

As the vitriol, invective, and dishonest attacks against Sarah Palin continue to come from the Left, demonstrating that their determination to destroy her remains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.

I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probably some who did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.

The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter of losing in Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people, only the politics matter.

Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.

Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group that has politics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.

We need to start to fight this—and by we I don’t mean somebody out there, I mean us, the common folks, the ordinary barbarians of this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they can exploit the hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level, following the example of (of all people) David Mamet:

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’s opinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way people hold their opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.

The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.

Total dependence

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 8
Q. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?

A. Yes,¹ unless we are born again,
by the Spirit of God.²

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

This is the doctrine typically referred to as "total depravity," and it's one that confuses some people. Andrew Kuyvenhoven's explanation (28) is helpful here:

Sin is worse than we are inclined to think, and salvation is bigger than any church can tell.

The Bible teaches that, by nature, people are "totally depraved." This is again a technical term, and it might be helpful to say, first, what it does not mean. We don't mean to say that people are as bad as they can possibly be. Most of the time, most of them are not. Neither do we mean that ordinary decent people cannot perform acts of kindness, helpfulness, courtesy, and so on. Many people do, and we thank God for the milk of human kindness and the paint of civilized surroundings.

By total depravity, we mean that sin has affected every part of every human being. . . .

The only solution to total depravity is total renewal. No person can do anything that is really acceptable to God unless he or she has a new heart.

The Christian life is a life of total dependence on the grace and the power of God. There is no "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" here, and no suggestion that if you just work harder, you can be good enough (nor the corollary that if anything's wrong in your life, it must mean you're not trying hard enough); nor is there any trace of the idea that to keep your salvation, you have to keep working harder. Rather, there is the call to joyful acceptance of our deliverance by Jesus Christ, who set us free from our slavery to sin, who took our death and gave us life.

On this blog in history: March 13-17, 2008

Rebuild the parties?
On why we might be suffering from an excess of democracy, in one respect.

Reclaiming the gospel?
We have a remarkable ability to get our idea of Christianity backwards . . .

A bad week for Barack Obama
The most recent polls show that a lot of folks who voted for the president are now questioning their votes, whether because of the Gates affair, because he's governed as a hard leftist, or whatever; but everything we see now was foreshadowed during the campaign, for those willing to believe it.

A matter of trust
"We hear God saying, 'Obey me, obey me, obey me'; but what God is really saying is, 'Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.'"

Health care hypocrisy

One of the key facts about the push to nationalize our healthcare system is that it's coming from people who have absolutely no intention to live under the system they're trying to produce. Barack Obama even admitted as much last month, though the media has done its best to ignore the fact. Give Jake Tapper and Karen Travers credit, though, for refusing to sweep the president's admission under the rug:

President Obama struggled to explain today whether his health care reform proposals would force normal Americans to make sacrifices that wealthier, more powerful people—like the president himself—wouldn't face. . . .

Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it's not provided by insurance.

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn't seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he's proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if "it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care."

That's telling. Would the president be willing to accept limitations on the care his wife and children could receive for the sake of the greater good? Dr. Devinsky asked. No, the president would not. He evaded the question for as long as he could with a non sequitur about his dying grandmother, but when he finally came back around to answering it briefly, that was his answer: no.

And after all, he won't have to accept the limitations of his plan—he's the President of the United States. He's famous, he's powerful, he defines well-connected . . . and he's a member of a government which routinely exempts its own members from the limitations of the laws it passes. Obamacare for thee, but not for me and mine, is indeed his attitude—he's too important and valuable a person for that. That's only for us ordinary barbarians.

For my part, I agree with Ed Morrissey:

If ObamaCare isn’t good enough for Sasha, Malia, or Michelle, then it’s not good enough for America. Instead of fighting that impulse, Obama should be working to boost the private sector to encourage more care providers, less red tape and expense, and better care for everyone.

But that's not what he's doing, and it's not what he's going to do; that's how he wants it to work for him and his family, but not for everyone else. Unless, of course, they're political allies whose support he needs and to whom he owes favors—then they can get special treatment too:

Who will decide when medical care is just too expensive to bother with? Who will be left to perish because they just aren't worth the lifesaving effort? Well, for sure it won't be any members of Congress or anyone that works for the federal government because they won't be expected to suffer under the nationally socialized plan. It also won't be Obama's buddies in the unions who are about to be similarly exempted from the national plan, at least if Senator Max Baucus has his way.

Insisting on standards for others to which one is unwilling to hold oneself? The word for that, I believe, is "hypocrisy"—and the forces of Obamacare are rife and rank with it. As James Lewis pointed out recently on the American Thinker website, one of our leading advocates of socialized medicine makes a pretty good poster boy for it.

Senator Ted Kennedy, who is now 76 years old and was diagnosed with brain cancer in May of last year, is telling the world that nationalized medical care is "the cause of his life." He wants to see it pass as soon as possible, before he departs this vale of tears.

The prospect of Kennedy's passing is viewed by the liberal press with anticipatory tears and mourning. But they are not asking the proper question by their own lights: That question—which will be asked for you and me when we reach his age and state in life—is this:

Is Senator Kennedy's life valuable enough to dedicate millions of dollars to extending it another month, another day, another year?

Because Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy agree with each other that they of all people are entitled to make that decision. Your decision to live or die will now be in their hands.

Ted Kennedy is now 76. Average life expectancy in the United States is 78.06. For a man who has already reached 76, life expectancy is somewhat longer than average (since people who die younger lower the national average); for a wealthy white man it may be somewhat longer statistically; but for a man with diagnosed brain cancer it is correspondingly less. As far as the actuarial tables of the Nanny State are concerned, Kennedy is due to leave this life some time soon. The socialist State is not sentimental, at least when it comes to the lives of ordinary people like you and me.

The socialist question—and yes, it is being asked very openly in socialist countries all around the world, like Britain and Sweden—must be whether extending Senator Kennedy's life by another day, another month or year is socially valuable enough to pay for what is no doubt a gigantic and growing medical bill. Kennedy is a US Senator, and all that money has been coughed up without complaint by the US taxpayer. Kennedy is already entitled to Federal health care, and it is no doubt the best available to anyone in the world. . . .

There might be a rational debate over the social utility of Senator Kennedy's life. We could all have a great national debate about it. Maybe we should do exactly that, to face the consequences of what the Left sees as so humane, so obviously benevolent, and so enlightened.

Consider what happens in the Netherlands to elderly people. The Netherlands legalized "assisted suicide" in 2002, no doubt in part for compassionate reasons. But also to save money. . . .

There's only so much money available. The Netherlands radio service had a quiz show at one time, designed to "raise public awareness" about precisely that question. Who deserves to live, and who to die?

But nobody debates any more about who has the power to make that decision. In socialist Europe the State does. It's a done deal. . . .

In the socialist Netherlands Kennedy would be a perfect candidate for passive euthanasia.

Has anyone raised this question with Senator Kennedy? I know it seems to be in bad taste to even mention it. But if ObamaCare passes in the coming weeks, you can be sure that that question will be raised for you and me, and our loved ones. And no, we will not have a choice.

One set of standards for the rich and the powerful, and another for the rest of us. One set of medical options for those who write the laws (and those who influence them), and another for those of us who live under them. That's liberalism? It seems to me there's something seriously wrong with that.

Which is why, to my way of thinking, Rep. John Fleming (R-LA) is a hero of the fight over Obamacare. Rep. Fleming, a physician, is the author and sponsor of House Resolution 615, which he describes this way:

I've offered a bill, HR 615, to give them a chance to put their "health" where their mouth is: My resolution urges members of Congress who vote for this legislation to lead by example and enroll themselves in the public plan that their bill would create.

The current draft of the Democratic bill curiously exempts members of Congress from the government-run health care option: The people's representatives would get to keep their existing health plans and services on Capitol Hill—even though the people wouldn't.

If members of Congress believe so strongly that government-run health care is the best solution for hardworking American families, I think it only fitting that Americans see them lead the way. . . .

Congress has the bad habit of exempting itself from the problems it inflicts on the American people. From common workplace protections to transparency and accountability measures, lawmakers always seem to place themselves and their staffs just out of reach of the laws they create.

Americans don't know that there is an attending physician on call exclusively for members of Congress, or that Congress enjoys VIP access and admission to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

It is past time that we make the men and women making the laws be exposed to the same consequences as the American public.

Public servants should always be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating, and I challenge the American people to demand this from their representatives.

We deserve health-care reform that puts a patient's well being in the hands of a doctor, not a bureaucrat.

I think he's right on. If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for the members of Congress, the employees of the Executive Branch (all the way up to the POTUS and his family), and the judges and staff of our courts. If you agree, you might want to go to Rep. Fleming's official website and sign the online petition in support of HR 615. Well done, Rep. Fleming; trust a doctor to know a boil when he sees it, and know how to lance it—even a spiritual one.

Further thoughts on the health care deform bill

As I noted in the previous post, there’s been a real lack of active leadership from the president on the whole issue of health care “reform,” which has been quite frustrating to his party. Unfortunately, instead of that, we’re getting more of his patented harangues. This is a bad thing because for all the praise he receives as an orator, Barack Obama is a remarkably lazy and juvenile rhetor; he has a terrible weakness for cheap rhetorical tricks, tending to lean on them heavily whenever he needs to make his case. One he particularly likes is to set up false, simple-minded dichotomies, which he can then use to either a) paint himself as offering a more enlightened third way forward, or b) portray his own position as obviously correct and that of those of us who disagree with him as obviously wrong.

As David Freddoso pointed out, that’s exactly what he did yet again in his prime-time press conference last week:

With his example of the red and blue pills, and another about whether a child’s hypothetical tonsils should be removed, President Obama unwittingly presents the real problem with his plan for reform. Here is a well-meaning government official who so fails to grasp the problem in health care that he can present such absurd oversimplifications and suggest that this sort of thing is the real problem—doctors simply lack the common sense to make obvious medical decisions. President Obama wants us to solve this problem by putting himself and other government officials in charge of rescuing medicine from the medical profession. If medical doctors with a decade of schooling cannot distinguish between good cures and ineffective ones that must be discontinued, then by gosh, we’re lucky that the good folks from the government can.

President Obama thus frames the issue as a false choice between doing nothing at all and handing over to Washington complicated, case-by-case medical decisions that cannot possibly be legislated or dictated by government.

Freddoso’s wrong about one thing: “complicated, case-by-case medical decisions” can in fact be “legislated or dictated by government”—in one way, which he mentions:

There is exactly one thing that government can do to control costs in health care: it can insist on paying below cost.

Granted, he’s thinking here of government short-changing insurance companies and medical providers, which is a significant problem in our current system:

This shifts the cost burden to private insurance companies, which in turn pass along higher premiums to their patients. This is what government-run Medicare does today for many treatments, including cancer. Government will do more of this kind of “saving” when it assumes greater responsibility for funding citizens’ health care, particularly if a government-option health care plan is established.

What he’s missing, though, is that this form of “saving” only has this particular effect when there’s still a sizeable public sector in existence to bear that burden and compensate for it with higher premiums. Kill off that private sector, as the president’s preferred approach will pretty much do, and you get a different result—which is what the Mayo Clinic is worried about:

Under the current Medicare system, a majority of doctors and hospitals that care for Medicare patients are paid substantially less than it costs to treat them. Many providers are therefore already approaching a point where they can not afford to see Medicare patients. Expansion of a Medicare-type plan without a method to define, measure, and pay for healthy outcomes for patients will move many doctors and hospitals across this threshold, and ultimately hurt the patients who seek our care.

You see, when the government bureaucrats need to make “complicated, case-by-case medical decisions,” they’re not going to make them on the basis of the things that truly make them “complicated” and “case-by-case”; they’re going to make them on the basis of the actuarial tables, on a cost/benefit analysis run purely from the perspective of the federal government, and the way they’ll make them is by telling doctors, “We won’t pay that much for that procedure” (if indeed they’re willing to pay anything for it at all). If the figure they set is low enough, the procedure won’t get done. The only variable for medical decisions will be government cost control. In his usual role as the ghoul at the party, Peter Singer has been the only one to come right out in public and tell everyone what that means: rationing of health care.

As cost issues come to dominate the government’s interest in the health care system—which is to say, as the rosy and unrealistic projections of cost savings which the Democrats are currently using to try to build public support for their plan quickly give way to reality, creating a budget crunch—this will also necessarily mean increased taxes. After all, Democrats never have the stomach for huge budget cuts (except from defense budgets), and certainly won’t be willing to embrace the kind of truly draconian rationing of medical care that would be necessary to solve that budget crunch without tax increases. That’s why, despite the promises the president made back when he was trying to get elected, the House’s health care bill already includes a significant tax on the uninsured.

As expected, the House bill would mandate that individuals and families have or buy health insurance.

But what if they don’t buy it?

Then Section 401 kicks in. Any individual (or family) that does not have health insurance would have to pay a new tax, roughly equal to the smaller of 2.5% of your income or the cost of a health insurance plan. . . .

I assume the bill authors would respond, “But why wouldn’t you want insurance? After all, we’re subsidizing it for everyone up to 400% of the poverty line.”

That is true. But if you’re a single person with income of $44,000 or higher, then you’re above 400% of the poverty line. You would not be subsidized, but would face the punitive tax if you didn’t get health insurance. This bill leaves an important gap between the subsidies and the cost of health insurance. CBO says that for about eight million people, that gap is too big to close, and they would get stuck paying higher taxes and still without health insurance.

Ed Morissey adds that “the mandate in the bill would force people to choose between paying the taxes or paying as much as three times as much for health insurance, assuming a family plan.” Still, isn’t that better than having 45.7 million uninsured people? Not necessarily; the crowning irony to this is that, as Deroy Murdock points out, the number of people for whom lack of medical insurance is truly a serious problem is actually about . . . eight million.

Obamacare is propelled by the oft-repeated Census Bureau statistic that 45.7 million Americans lack health insurance. Even if that number were accurate, why would Washington turn the health-care industry upside down for all 300 million Americans in order to help 45.7 million? In fact, as Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes demonstrates, public policy should concentrate on a far smaller group of hard cases.

From those 45.7 million uninsured, subtract 17.5 million who earn more than $50,000 annually. Though they can afford coverage, they evidently have other priorities. Of the remaining 28.2 million uninsured, some 14 million are eligible for, yet have not enrolled in, the Medicaid and S-CHIP programs. Meanwhile, as many as 10 million uninsured may be illegal aliens. All told, Pipes estimates that only about 8 million Americans are uninsured due to chronic illness or working-poor status. The latter have incomes too high for assistance and too low for insurance.

In other words: if the House bill passes, it will throw a huge amount of money at the problem of people who can’t afford medical insurance, and the result will be that the same number of people will be unable to afford medical insurance, except that they’ll be paying higher taxes for the privilege. Even for D.C., that will be an amazing accomplishment.

Barack Obama is no Napoleon Bonaparte

For all the real problems with our country’s health care system, the current fight in Congress is more about Barack Obama’s agenda than it is about what this country needs; you can see that in the way he’s tried to argue that bringing in massive new regulation of our health care system is necessary to fix the economy (a line which, to judge by current polling, most voters aren’t buying). That’s why Sen. Jim DeMint declared that if the president can’t get this bill passed, “it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” President Obama knows it, too, as an anecdote in a recent National Journal story, told by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, shows:

“Let’s just lay everything on the table,” Grassley said. “A Democrat congressman last week told me after a conversation with the president that the president had trouble in the House of Representatives, and it wasn’t going to pass if there weren’t some changes made . . . and the president says, ‘You’re going to destroy my presidency.’”

Which makes the president’s lack of real leadership on this issue telling. CNN’s Political Ticker noted last week that Democrats on the Hill are unhappy with his failure to do his part to get a health care bill passed:

One Democratic senator tells CNN congressional Democrats are “baffled,” and another senior Democratic source tells CNN members of the president’s own party are still “frustrated” that they’re not getting more specific direction from him on health care. “We appreciate the rhetoric and his willingness to ratchet up the pressure but what most Democrats on the Hill are looking for is for the president to weigh in and make decisions on outstanding issues. Instead of sending out his people and saying the president isn’t ruling anything out, members would like a little bit of clarity on what he would support—especially on how to pay for his health reform bill,” a senior Democratic congressional source tells CNN.

How did he respond? By going out and picking a fight with the Cambridge, MA police, which “sucked the oxygen out of the health care debate at the very moment Democrats were pleading for him to become more involved.”

President Obama clearly recognizes that in making a huge statist health care bill central to his agenda and staking a great deal of political capital on it, he has made it a bill which he must get passed if he’s to be able to lead effectively; if it fails, it will demonstrate significant political weakness to conservatives, to voters more generally, to the political class, to our nation’s allies, and to our enemies abroad. That’s why he told his party’s congressional wing that they will “destroy his presidency” if they don’t pass it without major changes; that’s why Sen. DeMint called it potentially his Waterloo.

In one sense, of course, that comparison is overstated, because the Obama administration isn’t going to fall if the Democratic health care bill fails; the president will be weakened politically, but he’ll still be the president. In another sense, though, Sen. DeMint’s comparison might not even be strong enough, because the most telling thing about this whole situation is that when faced—by his own admission—with the possible destruction of his presidency, Barack Obama has left it in the hands of Congress to prevent that. He’s happy to go on TV and host a press conference, but when it comes to the nitty-gritty work of leadership, he’s completely hands-off. For whatever reason, he just can’t or won’t do that.

This is the great difference between President Obama and Emperor Napoleon: Napoleon was on the field at Waterloo. He wasn’t on the front line itself, leading a charge, but he was right there with the army, giving orders and calling the shots. President Obama, by contrast, has left that job to Marshal Pelosi and General Reid—he’s back in Paris canoodling with Josephine. I’m not sure what that says about his ability and willingness to be a real leader, but whatever it is, it ain’t good.