remember to pray for our Irish President, Barack O’Bama.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
A good short sketch of the life of St. Patrick
can be found today on the American Spectator website, courtesy of one James M. Thunder, along with a more detailed piece by G. Tracy Mehan III called “The Solitude of St. Patrick.” I commend both to your reading, especially if you aren’t familiar with the true life and accomplishments of this towering evangelist-bishop of the early church; if you are, they won’t be news to you, but you ought to read them anyway, because St. Patrick is one of those people who’s always worth spending time with. And then go and read his Confession, which stands to this day, over 1500 years later, as one of the greatest Christian books ever written. Here is deep wisdom, and a great love for God; here is a true saint, and a model for the church.
Parading your ignorance and calling it “reality”
or, The Irony of Ignorant Palin-Bashers Bashing Gov. Palin for Being IgnorantAs I noted yesterday, “echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools”; today saw a particularly egregious example, courtesy(?) of Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson, who smugly declares,
This isn’t an argument for abortion, but one for reality—drop abstinence only, make contraceptives available and consider adoption, relying on grandparents, or single parenting until the child herself grows up.
OK, so if we’re making a parade about “an argument for . . . reality,” let’s consider what the reality actually is here, shall we? Unfortunately for Carlson, if we do that, she doesn’t come off very well.First, she says, “drop abstinence only.” One problem:
Abstinence-only education doesn’t actually exist. It’s a term used by critics of abstinence education rather than purveyors, who prefer, simply, abstinence education. The term “abstinence-only” attempts to create the perception that abstinence education is a narrow and unrealistic approach. While such loaded terms are to be expected of activists, the media usage of the term is regrettable.
In other words, Carlson’s beating a straw man, asking conservatives to drop something that we don’t advocate; she’s busy feeling smugly superior to people who do not in fact exist. Good for her ego, bad for her argument, and worse for her understanding of what’s actually going on (which might be a trade she’s happy to take, for all I know).Second, as Mollie Ziegler Hemingway also points out, the smugly superior types like Carlson not only don’t know what abstinence education is, they don’t understand what it’s about.
The liberal caricature of abstinence education is of school marms rapping the knuckles of teens and telling them—day after day—not to have sex. In fact, a review of curricula for abstinence education programs shows surprisingly little about sex—and a lot about building self-esteem, understanding risky behavior, finding responsible partners, and growing a family.ReCapturing the Vision, one abstinence curriculum used for girls-only education, begins with a unit designed to help students see their bodies as beautiful and to accept themselves as they are. Other units teach them how to define their morals and values, resist negative influences, manage conflict and understand their emotions, and determine how to achieve personal, academic, professional, and financial goals. The final unit uses mock interviews, job searches, and résumé writing to help girls transition to adulthood.In other words, abstinence education isn’t only, or even primarily, about preventing teen pregnancy. It is about learning life skills, encouraging the formation of families, and taking responsibility for your behavior, which helps explain the cultural chasm between its supporters and those who saw Bristol Palin and screamed “hypocrisy!”
Third, when Carlson says we should “make contraceptives available,” she might be surprised to know that Gov. Palin agrees with her. This isn’t speculation, either, as the governor is already on the record on this subject—and not in the way that her ignorant detractors assume from their bigoted stereotypes:
In a widely quoted 2006 survey she answered during her gubernatorial campaign, Palin said she supported abstinence-until-marriage programs. But weeks later, she proclaimed herself “pro-contraception” and said condoms ought to be discussed in schools alongside abstinence.“I’m pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues,” she said during a debate in Juneau. . . .Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella said the governor stands by her 2006 statement, supporting sex education that covers both abstinence and contraception.
The irony of the whole thing is, that position put her at odds with both the GOP platform and her running mate, which is why the Los Angeles Times titled its story on this “Palin appears to disagree with McCain on sex education”; but when the MSM decided it was more politically advantageous to stereotype Gov. Palin and beat her for something she doesn’t actually believe than to use what she does believe to try to drive a wedge between her and her running mate, the truth was conveniently forgotten.Fourth, the implicit assumption that since Bristol Palin got pregnant, she must have been taught about sex in a non-liberal-approved fashion is just that: an assumption, and an unwarranted one, at that, as Hemingway points out.
No one bothered to find out what type of sex education, if any, Bristol had received and assumed her mother—despite on-the-record comments supportive of teaching both abstinence and contraception—opposed sex education.
(As Hemingway further notes, even if the assumption were correct, “it is empirically laughable to judge the effectiveness or utility of abstinence education based on one teen pregnancy”; but folks like Carlson who are pushing an agenda don’t care about inconvenient truths like that.)Finally, Carlson asserts that people should “consider adoption, relying on grandparents, or single parenting” rather than allowing/encouraging teens to marry. Her sweeping unfounded assumption here is almost too grandiose and simplistic to answer; this doesn’t qualify as an “argument for reality” because it shows no effort to understand what the reality is. To wit, who says people don’t do all those things? No evidence I’ve seen, certainly; and in the case of the Palin family, it’s been crystal-clear ever since the news broke that family support, not just from grandparents but also from great-grandparents and others, was very much a part of the plan for the care and support of little Tripp and his parents. (As for her suggestion that single parenting is a better option than marriage, I can only conclude two things: one, Margaret Carlson has never studied the issue in any meaningful way; and two, she probably wasn’t a single mother as a teen.)Taken all in all, I can only conclude that Carlson’s column on the Palins would be a good deal better if she actually had a clue what she’s talking about. It’s a pity that the media we have now don’t care enough about such things to enforce them.
Sarah Palin through the spyglass
My father-in-law is a sharp and perceptive chap, with a remarkable ability to think beyond what the conventional wisdom says is possible. I’ll sometimes joke about myself that one of the biggest things I have to offer is my crack-brained ideas—I just need someone else who can tell me which ones are worth keeping once cracked; my father-in-law is like that too, except that he’s less inhibited than I am. He started in February of last year trying to convince me that the first-term governor of Alaska was the best choice for #2 on the Republican ticket; by June, with John McCain the clear nominee for the top slot, he had me convinced. Since then, my support for Gov. Palin has only increased. Here are, I think, the most important posts I’ve put up about the GOP’s Great Northern Hope (updated through 5/20/09):Sarah Palin for VP
The post that started it allThe “I Am Sarah Palin” vote is mobilizing
For all my arguments for Gov. Palin on the ticket, this was one I didn’t see comingDisappointment is no argument against Gov. Palin
Defending her (and her daughter) against conservative complainersPalin rumors and Palin facts
Debunking the lies (and there have been many)British Palin envy
What some Brits realized that most Americans didn’tPositive feminist perspectives on Sarah Palin
Because those who were willing to see her for who she is were impressed, even as they disagree with her positionsThe speech they wouldn’t let Sarah Palin give
is a perspective on Iran that the current administration could useWhither Sarah Palin?
My $0.02 on the tack she should take for the next few yearsCamille Paglia on Sarah Palin
How to admire someone with whom you believe almost nothing in commonWhy America needs Sarah Palin
Her 2009 State of the State address is a model of conservative governing philosophy. . . and Sarah Palin’s biography matters, too
This links to an excellent biographical sketch of Gov. Palin’s life and its significance for her as a politician and executiveThe real meaning of the evangelical response to Bristol Palin
The Palin family as microcosmParading your ignorance and calling it “reality”
Correcting the misrepresentation of Gov. Palin’s position on sex education.We should have seen Sarah Palin coming
On why Gov. Palin is the candidate the Republican base has been looking for.Franklin Graham likes Sarah Palin’s coattails
Considering the significance of Samaritan’s Purse highlighting Gov. Palin in its fundraising.Political machines hate reformers
“That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months.”Mitt Romney, the Beltway GOP, and the meaning of Evansville
On the real significance of Gov. Palin’s appearance at the Vandenburgh County Right to Life banquet.Gov. Palin and the abortion shift
From the time of her appearance (and Trig’s!) on the national scene, support for abortion has declined significantly. Hmmm . . .
The real meaning of the evangelical response to Bristol Palin
I really didn’t want to write about the news of Bristol Palin’s broken engagement, which I found saddening and disheartening. In analyzing it, I had two main reactions. First, that this story is basically about a teenage girl who’s done some unwise things and made some bad decisions, both of which are pretty common at that age. (I was going to write, “that age at which we tend to think we’re much wiser and more mature than we really are”—but as far as I can tell, that describes every age.) If you’re honest, you’d have to admit that you did some really dumb things at 17. For my part, at that age, I didn’t do much of anything besides go to school, go home, read, and go to church on Sundays—I didn’t hardly have the opportunity to do dumb stuff—but I did. “Teenage girl does something foolish, pays consequences” is an afterschool special or a Very Special Episode; as “news,” it’s strictly dog-bites-man. The only thing that makes this “newsworthy” is who Bristol Palin’s mother is.Second, am I the only one who read the piece in the AP and thought, “Wow, Levi Johnston’s sister is a real witch”? It might not be fair, but I definitely got the vibe that she was jealous of Bristol, glad that Levi dumped her (since it also read to me like he was the dumper and she was the dumpee), and gleeful at the opportunity to shred her reputation in the national media.As far as national media reaction, though, I really didn’t want to go there. As long as it was just confirmed PDS cases like Bonnie Erbe, I could let it slide; after all, the folks at National Review dispatched her quite handily. (For those who might not know, PDS stands for “Palin Derangement Syndrome,” the official diagnosis for anyone whose rational processes go into violent spasms any time the word “Palin” is mentioned or a moose becomes visible on the horizon; for some reason the alternative name “Palin Madness Syndrome” never caught on.) I didn’t see the benefit in giving Ms. Erbe’s commentary the unearned dignity of being treated seriously. Granted, the fact that she and other echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools (when in fact she explicitly supports doing so, though she does believe that sex education should encourage abstinence) deserved a response—but if I’d posted about that by itself, as I’ve been meaning to do, I could and would have done so perfectly easily without mentioning Bristol Palin.And then I ran across Jon Swift’s post, and I couldn’t let that one pass.Swift, a self-described “reasonable conservative,” asks the question, “Why is Bristol Palin different from Murphy Brown?” and comes up with the conclusion, “She is different because she is a conservative”—a conclusion which he then proceeds to argue and extend at tedious and tendentious length.His argument, to put it politely, is full of holes and rests on a number of unexamined assumptions; he gives a few examples of cases where conservative commentators had non-identical reactions to superficially similar situations and then concludes (without further evidence) that this is because of the political views of the people in question. (Since one of his examples rests on the assumption that “Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn’t become lesbians like their mother,” this is particularly dubious.) He then launches into what he apparently considers to be biting satire on Christian conservatives, writing,
We should have the courage of our convictions and not play the liberal game of moral equivalency. Instead of trying to explain away Bristol’s pregnancy we should be defending it, holding her up as an example of the difference between liberal teenage unwed mothers and conservative teenage unwed mothers. Because just as it is true that, as Richard Nixon once said, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” when a good Christian conservative has a child out of wedlock, that means it’s not immoral.
The truth of the matter is, even if one concedes that he’s caught Kathryn Jean Lopez and Lisa Schiffren in the hypocrisy of which he accuses them—which I do not grant, but for the sake of argument—that doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t prove, first, that their hypocrisy is ideological at its root, nor second, that they would be representative of most conservatives in that respect.The first is, contra Swift’s evident assumption, something which does in fact have to be proven, since political persuasion is not the only difference between, say, Bristol Palin and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, and he doesn’t bother to examine Lopez’ and Schiffren’s arguments to see what they’re actually saying—he simply summarizes their positions and moves on to the ad hominem part. The second rests on yet another assumption on Swift’s part, that evangelical attitudes toward teen pregnancy and unwed motherhood are still as hostile as old stereotypes make them out to be—and here’s where his argument fails altogether, because that’s simply no longer the case.I’m reluctant to give props to David Frum, who looks more like a giant wooden horse every time I see his byline, but he did a much better job than Swift on this issue in an article he wrote six months ago for Canada’s National Post. He opened his piece in a manner Swift would no doubt approve—”Whoever imagined that we would see a Republican convention rapturously applaud an unwed teen mother?”—but then went on to actually think about what that really meant, and what it really tells us:
That moment confirmed a dramatic evolution in American politics: the transformation of the pro-life movement from an unambiguously conservative force into something more complex. . . .The pro-life movement has come to terms with the sexual revolution. So long as unwed parenthood is considered disgraceful, many unwed mothers will choose abortion to escape disgrace. And so, step by step, the pro-life movement has evolved to an accepting—even welcoming—attitude toward pregnancy outside marriage.
As I wrote about Frum’s article at the time, though I think “welcoming” is an overstatement,
Frum has captured and crystallized something of which I was aware—in my own attitudes and approach to ministry, no less than in the lives of others—but which I hadn’t consciously thought about. Put simply, when pro-life concerns cross with the concern for other issues, the tie goes to the baby.
The truth is, Frum is (if you’ll excuse the pun) dead right on this subject. Sure, time was that conservative Christians in this country stigmatized teen pregnancy and disapproved of it as hard as we could; and then folks started pointing out that we weren’t really discouraging teenagers from getting pregnant—all we were doing was driving them into the ungentle hands of the abortion industry. Collectively, we took a look at ourselves and realized that the critics were right; and over time, we by and large decided that we could live with teenage pregnancy and teen single motherhood—just don’t kill the baby.That’s the message on which most evangelicals in America have settled, when it comes to kids like Bristol Palin: just don’t kill the baby, and we’ll do what we can to support you and help you out. Why else have we started crisis pregnancy centers all over the place? We didn’t have a utopian choice here, we had the choice of two evils; we stared it dead in the face, thought about it for a while, and picked the lesser one. This is the bargain we made, and I believe it’s done more to reduce the abortion rate in this country than any government policy, even as it’s boosted the rate of illegitimacy. Frum quotes the statistics:
As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock—now reaching almost 37%—and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions. In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.
Now, it seems to me likely that some of those young women wouldn’t have gotten pregnant at all if there were still the old stigma attached to unwed motherhood and illegitimacy; it also seems to me likely that for far more of them, that stigma wouldn’t have been enough to keep them from having sex, but only to send them running to the nearest abortionist to keep anyone from finding out they’d gotten pregnant. I can’t prove that scientifically, to be sure, but that’s what my experience suggests to me, and many of my colleagues in ministry would say the same.I don’t remember exactly how many weddings I’ve done (it’s not a huge number), but I remember how many couples I’ve married who were virgins on their wedding night: one. Is this a good thing? No. Is it reality? Yes. Will it be changing any time soon? No. And if we’re going to make any headway against it, is it going to be through a return to older tactics? Will we accomplish anything by trying to scare teens away from sex and making examples of girls who get pregnant? No. No, we’re not—it isn’t going to happen.Our culture is sex-saturated, we’re flooded with erotic stimuli, and there’s a powerful cultural push toward sexual activity—combined, alas, with other trends that are pushing the average marriage age later and later—and we aren’t going to be able to shovel our way out of this flood by making a negative case. There is nothing to be gained by making a pariah and a target out of girls like Bristol Palin, and whatever you may think about evangelical Christians, we’re smart enough to see that. We need to keep working on rolling back this tide, but we aren’t going to do it that way; we’re working on other approaches (including the abstinence-education programs Gov. Palin has been unfairly derided for supporting), but they’re going to take time. And in the meantime, we have to live in this culture as it really is, not as we wish it were, and to do the best we can with what we have.What’s the difference between Bristol Palin and Murphy Brown? Twenty years. Twenty years’ bitter experience of the law of unintended consequences, that’s all.Update: Welcome to folks coming over from The Point and C4P—I hope you take the time to have a look around. Those of you from C4P might be particularly interested in today’s post responding specifically to Margaret Carlson.
The Stubborn Faithfulness of God
In these passages, we see the grief of God. If ever there was a people who had reason to trust God, it was the Israelites. Just look at all the miracles and mighty works God did for their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and then for them as a nation. They were a slave race, being worked to death—literally—by the Egyptians, and God broke them out, and led them through the Red Sea to get the army off their trail; you’d think they’d respond with unstinting gratitude and trust. Nope. Before they’ve even halfway escaped, they’re already complaining and reminiscing about the good old days—when, sure, the Egyptians worked them to exhaustion every day from morning until night, and if they ever slacked off, the overseers would whip them back to work—but hey! they had onions!
Things didn’t get better from there, either; God would keep raising up leaders, and for a while, the people would follow, but as soon as they got the chance they were off chasing after other gods again. Finally, things got so bad that God allowed his people to be conquered and dragged off to Mesopotamia; but they didn’t learn their lesson. Indeed, his proclamation of deliverance, of an end to their exile and a return home, was met with distrust, complaints, and resistance, as we’ve seen over the past number of weeks. In consequence, Isaiah has responded alternately with frustration and anger at his people’s stubborn disbelief and by pleading with them to trust God for all he’s done for them, and for what he’s going to do.
Both of these things reach their peak in this chapter. As we’ve been reading through Isaiah 40-55, what’s commonly called Second Isaiah, I’ve talked about it as one section of the larger book, and it is; but in its turn, it’s most definitely divided into two parts. This chapter is the end of the first part; with chapter 49, something new begins, and we’ll talk about that next week. What we can see here is a clear statement of the problem Israel presents—their stubborn refusal to be faithful to God, and his equally stubborn determination to be faithful to them anyway.
Look how this chapter begins. Remember, we’ve had God’s repeated promise to bring his people back out of exile, and his repeated statements that he will do so by raising up Cyrus, king of the Medes and the Persians, to conquer Babylon and carry out his purposes. We’ve just had, in the passage we read last week, an extended description of the judgment God will visit on Babylon through Cyrus, bringing them down from their pride and arrogance to a point of utter defeat and humiliation. All this should be good news—but as far as response from God’s people, we’ve seen disbelief that he can actually do what he promises, refusal to turn away from their idols to put their trust in him alone, and nationalistic whining that God would use yet another pagan to set them free rather than enabling them to free themselves. What we haven’t seen any sign of is faithful obedience to the commands and will of God.
As a consequence, God begins by addressing his people through his prophet, and he piles on the descriptions: “Listen to this, O house of Jacob, you who are called by the name of Israel”—the name which God had given to Jacob—“and come from the line of Judah, you who take oaths in the name of the LORD and invoke the God of Israel.” All this marks them as the people who belong to him: he’s the one who chose them, he’s the one who named them, he’s the God with whom their nation is identified and in whose name they take their oaths. He is, we might say, the God of their civil religion, in the same way as our public officials and witnesses in our courts swear on the Bible and end their oaths of office with the words, “so help me God.” But just as we have a lot of people who say those words and mean nothing by them, so Israel’s outward participation in the rituals of their faith said little for the reality of their beliefs; and so God says, “Though you call upon me and take oaths in my name, it’s neither in truth nor in righteousness.” Their faith, he says, is false, because it’s not based in real knowledge of him nor does it produce any real willingness to live as he wants them to live.
This is a pretty strong charge. In contemporary terms, he’s saying that the faith of the nation as a whole—not of everyone in it, of course, but of the nation as a whole—is nominal. It’s a matter of outward show with no inward reality, of religious exercise without any real faith. This wasn’t an issue which was unique to them, of course; if we want to be honest, looking around at the church in this country, we’d have to wonder if God would say much the same sort of thing to us, if Isaiah were alive in our day. There certainly are other voices saying this; one is Michael Spencer, who had a column in the Christian Science Monitor this week—you might have seen it—in which he predicted the complete collapse of American evangelicalism within the next ten years, to be followed by “an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West” in which “public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity” and we’ll see actual persecution of believers in this country. His reason for this conclusion, though he doesn’t put it in the terms Isaiah uses, boils down to pretty much the same thing: American Christians invoke the name of the God of Israel, but not in truth or righteousness. As a consequence, he argues, the church in this country is as hollow as a soufflé rising in the oven; all it will take is one slam of a door to bring it down.
Now, I happen to think, and have argued elsewhere, that Spencer’s conclusions are overstated; I also think he’s left the Holy Spirit out of the equation altogether. That said, I think he’s called attention to a real problem in much of the American church; I think we need to realize that Isaiah’s words to Israel here hit a lot closer to home than we might like to think. It seems to me that verse 2 offers us something of a clue as to why. At first glance, this might seem like an odd follow-up to verse 1; but consider the description of the people of Israel here: “you who call yourselves citizens of the holy city and rely on the God of Israel.” Here as in verse 1, God is identified as the God of Israel; and what does the prophet say in response: “The LORD Almighty is his name.”
That’s subtle, but I think it’s a rebuke to the parochialism of Israel. Their concern is only for themselves, and they see their God as just “an amiable local deity who exists to keep track of Israel’s interests,” as John Oswalt puts it. Instead of seeing themselves as a nation formed by the only God of all time and space for the purpose of bringing all the nations to the worship of that God, they see themselves as a nation like any other nation, with a god like any other nation, out for their own best interests like any other nation; and since they’re a small nation, they must have a small god, and thus they keep running after the gods of the bigger, more powerful nations in hopes of improving their geopolitical standing. What God wants them to see is that the nation ought to be only of secondary importance; he’s promised to return them to their homeland, yes, but not because their political independence or political power are of any significance whatsoever. It is, rather, for his own sake, for the sake of his reputation and his glory. What matters is God’s plan for the world, and their faithfulness to serve him by doing their part in it.
Of course, they don’t get this, and they don’t particularly want to; but God keeps working on them. He reminds his people of the many times in the past that he had told them what would happen, and then brought about what he predicted; and look at verses 4-5. Why did he do this? “Because I knew how stubborn you are”! If God had simply done good things for them, would they have given him the credit? No, they would have given the credit as they saw fit, to the idols they themselves had made. God told them what he was going to do before he did it so that they would know who was truly responsible. They could always refuse to admit that knowledge—and sometimes they did; that’s why God has to say, “You’ve heard these things. Won’t you admit them?”—but they would have no excuse and no justification for their refusal.
This is also why he says, “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. They are created now, not long ago; you have not heard of them before today, and so you cannot say, ‘Yes, I knew of them.’” This is the reason, or part of the reason, why God chose to use Cyrus to return the Jews to Israel: because it was a new thing, something he hadn’t done before, and that his people couldn’t and wouldn’t have predicted. It also gave him the opportunity to predict—by name—the appearance and success of someone from a pagan nation, someone who didn’t worship him or even know of his existence, and thus to demonstrate in a new way that he truly is the God of the whole world, the LORD Almighty, not just the God of Israel.
And he does all this despite Israel’s willful refusal to listen. “See,” he says, “I have refined you, but not as silver.” During Advent, we looked at Malachi 3, where the prophet says that the Lord will sit as a refiner of silver, and we talked a little about what that meant; we talked about the fact that the refiner of silver burns away all the dross, all the impurities, until only the silver is left, and in its absolute purity he can see his face reflected in it. Here, the Lord is giving up on that, at least where Israel is concerned. Their time in exile hasn’t brought them around to repentance, it hasn’t brought them to a spirit of true faithfulness—but there’s no point in leaving them in the fire; there’s no point in refining them further, because it wouldn’t accomplish anything. To try to refine them as silver would leave nothing of them at all, because everything would burn away, and so God declares, “I delay my wrath . . . I hold it back from you,” simply for the sake of his own reputation and his own praise.
There is, I said, a sad tone to this chapter. After all God has done for his people and all the promises he’s made them, and even after the promise to bring them back from their exile in Babylon, they remain obstinate, unwilling to open their hearts, unwilling to seek him first; and so here, it seems to me, we have God conceding that that isn’t going to change. Their neck remains unbending iron, their forehead remains obdurate bronze, and their ears remain insistently closed, refusing to hear what God would tell them; and so he says, “I am the LORD your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go”—the very thing his people refused to believe, because they thought they had a better idea what was best for them, and which way they should go.
They thought they knew best, and they refused to accept his correction, and so all God can do is cry out, “If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Your descendants would have been like the sand, your children like its numberless grains; their name would never be cut off nor destroyed from before me.” If only . . . if only. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cried out, “how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings; but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate, and you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
And yet, despite it all, God remains faithful. He delivers his people from Babylon, bringing them back to Jerusalem, even though it won’t be the deliverance he desires, even though he knows it won’t bring them his peace because their hearts remain wicked; he delivers them because he has promised, because his nature requires it, because who he is is to be faithful and to keep his word. He remains faithful and delivers his people because even though they don’t believe in him, even though they don’t listen to him, even though they don’t trust him, yet he is who he says he is; he is faithful even when his people don’t expect him to be, don’t trust him to be, maybe at some level don’t want him to be, and even when they will never respond to his faithfulness with faithfulness of their own.
You cannot outrun God, and you cannot go beyond his faithfulness; no matter how far you may go in your sin, repentance isn’t about turning around and trying to find your way back to God, because he’s already there—repentance is simply about accepting being found. No matter what may come and how far you may push it, you cannot go beyond the faithfulness of God until you’re dead—and maybe, somehow, not even then. You just can’t. If you don’t believe that, just look at Jesus; just look at how far God has already gone, and think about it for a while.
So what does God ask from us? To trust him. To trust in his faithfulness, and to live out of that trust. Being faithful to God isn’t a matter of doing certain things, or living in a certain way; that’s what results from faithfulness. The faithfulness God desires is a matter of trusting him enough that we live as he calls us to live, not out of duty, but because we really believe that he teaches us what’s best for us, and because we trust him that he truly is directing us in the way in which we should go.
Channeling Dubya, yet again
In the closing days of his Administration, President Bush removed gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list.Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, has decided to support President Bush’s position on the issue and leave the wolves off the list, prompting outrage from the eco-nuts in Obama’s base.How long before we see Ashley Judd attacking Obama in web ads?UPDATE: Steve Altman in the comments points out an interesting development: Only two days after his much-publicized lifting of a federal funding ban on research involving human embryos (therefore causing Christopher Reeve to walk again), he has signed into law essentially the exact same ban as part of the Omnibus Spending Bill. So he’s basically wasted everybody’s time with a bunch of posturing while accomplishing precisely nothing for his base.
Speaking as a former Coloradan who remembers when Secretary Salazar was Colorado Attorney General Salazar, I’m not at all surprised by his action; he represents a Western sensibility on the environment, one that seeks to balance environmental concerns with the needs of people, not the views of the East Coast elite. I don’t always agree with his positions, to be sure, but I expected him to chart a balanced, thoughtful course at Interior, and so far, I’ve seen nothing to make me think otherwise.As for the Obama administration’s sleight of hand on ESCR, that’s no vast surprise either; I wasn’t aware that that language was a standard part of the national budget, but since the whole thing combines passing the buck to Congress with a symbolic action that produces no practical effect, two things which we’ve seen over and over again during the first two months of this administration, there’s nothing startling here.
. . . and Sarah Palin’s biography matters, too
R. A. Mansour has a long post up today called “Who Is Sarah Palin?” It’s a fine piece of work drawing on all the major widely-available sources—the biographies by Kaylene Johnson and Lorenzo Benet, John Ziegler’s interview, Sally Jenkins’ Washington Post profile, and others—and drawing, I think, some fine conclusions. It’s an excellent biographical sketch, and I commend it to your reading. Even if you’re already a strong supporter of Gov. Palin, it will likely add to your understanding of her; if all you know of her is what the MSM told you during the campaign, then I strongly encourage you to take the time to find out more about who she really is, as opposed to what it was politically advantageous for the Democratic Party PR machine to say about her.
Yes, Barack Obama’s associations mattered
I know his apologists in the media and elsewhere didn’t want people talking about Tony Rezko, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright III, Bill Ayers, Fr. Michael Pfleger, Rashad Khalidi, Nadhmi Auchi, James Johnson, and Franklin Raines; I remember many solemn asseverations that talking about these people was just a distraction from the real issues, and a cynical attempt on the part of Republicans to play politics to bring Sen. Obama down.Except, it wasn’t, because his associations did matter. Granted, the fact that Barack Obama did business with Tony Rezko doesn’t necessarily mean he’s crooked, nor does his friendship with Rashid Khalidi necessarily mean that he shares Khalidi’s views on the Near East; these conclusions are not inevitable, but debatable. Even given that, however, the pattern of his associations told us some important things about his judgment of people—most importantly, that his judgment of people is quite poor, which should have led to the conclusion that his personnel judgment in staffing the Executive Branch was likely to be quite poor.And so it has proven to be. Tim Geithner was approved for Treasury despite being exposed as a tax cheat because the Senate was convinced that he was the best person for the job; instead, his performance has been abysmal, he’s a millstone around the president’s neck, and Washington’s thousand little knives are already out for him. Of course, it would help if the administration didn’t keep losing nominees for the rest of the senior positions in the Treasury Department, and particularly for the #2 slot. Equally of course, tax problems haven’t just been for Treasury appointees, since failure to pay taxes was one of the things (though not the worst) that forced Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination, and have caused problems for other appointments as well, including White House Counsel Greg Craig.Then there’s Vivek Kundra. Kundra was President Obama’s choice as Chief Information Officer for the administration; now he’s taking a leave of absence after the FBI raided his old office and arrested two people, including one of his former top aides, Yusuf Acar. According to the Washington Post,
the conspiracy, which operated for at least a year, worked like this:Acar approved work with a vendor, such as Bansal’s AITC, to arrange the purchase of goods such as software. The vendor ordered fewer items but billed the District for a larger amount. Bansal, Acar and others then split the proceeds, FBI officials said.Acar also approved fraudulent time sheets for nonexistent employees, [FBI agent Andrew] Sekela wrote. Acar and the others split the proceeds paid by the D.C. government, Sekela alleged.Authorities traced more than $200,000 in payments last year from Bansal’s firm to a private company, Circle Networks Inc. The firm is co-owned by Acar, even though he is prohibited from having an interest in any company doing business with the city, Sekela wrote. Circle Networks generated about $2.2 million in revenue through D.C. government contracts, the agent wrote.
Kundra himself hasn’t been implicated in wrongdoing, but it does raise the question of exactly what Kundra did as the head of DC’s technology office. Acar worked as Kundra’s aide, and at best one can say that Acar managed to run this ring right under Kundra’s nose. Kundra had to approve, explicitly or tacitly, the payroll for the agency, which employed less than 300 people. Any competent chief executive of a firm that size would know how many employees worked for him and how much they cost; in fact, it would be one of the primary issues on their agenda. . . .The best we can say about Vivek Kundra in this episode is that he’s incompetent as an executive.
And then there’s the saga of Chas Freeman: a paid apologist for the House of Sa’ud who’s changed his views on the Near East and Middle East for the sake of the Sa’udi oil money in his pockets; a man with financial ties to the Chinese government who defended the Tiananmen Square massacre—or more accurately, argued that the Chinese didn’t respond strongly enough to protestors. Matt Welch of Reason examined Freeman’s views and concluded,
This is the definition of clientitis; it exhibits not a “startling propensity to speak truth to power” but rather a startling propensity to lob bouquets at dictators.
As such, though Freeman’s trying to blame his withdrawal on the Israel lobby, there were far broader concerns about his appointment, raised by Democrats such as Charles Schumer and Jonathan Chait as well as Republicans, than just the anti-Israel views he evolved during his years on the Sa’udi payroll. Anyone willing to change his positions to suit foreign governments willing to pay him, whether liberal or conservative, is the wrong person to put in charge of writing the National Intelligence Estimates on which so much of our foreign policy is based.These aren’t the only problems with the administration’s appointment process, either—we’ve also seen the appointment and unappointment of Anthony Zinni, dubious nominations at Labor and Energy, and a press secretary who’s Scott McClellan redux and has done the administration no good coping with the blowback. All in all, it’s hard to argue with Billy Hollis’ summary of the situation:
An economic Trojan horse
Michael Ledeen summarizes it this way: “Obama told us he was going to use Congress to redistribute the wealth—explicitly. And he thinks it’s in the Constitution.”As a lolcat might put it:
“It” is the message Barack Obama delivered in a radio interview several years back, which is now embodied in his administration’s economic policy. The audio of that interview is below; as Wizbang blogger Steve Schippert summarized it last fall,
Obama laments in the interview that the Warren Supreme Court failed to reinterpret the Constitution to read into it what was not there: Redistribution of wealth for “political and economic justice in this society.” . . .For Obama, the redistribution of wealth is a civil right that the civil rights movement failed to attain. To Barack Obama, the redistribution of wealth is basic “political and economic justice,” and one segment of society has the basic right to the money of other segments of society. He’s very straight forward about this.And while in the interview he did not think wealth redistribution could be affected through the courts, he was confident that it could be attained “legislatively.”
President Obama’s intellectual foundation on this issue is the work of two liberal French economists (if that isn’t a redundancy) named Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. Daniel Henninger describes their work and its influence on the Obama administration’s economic strategy here:
Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography—”Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope.” Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone’s life: “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise. The President’s Budget and Fiscal Preview” (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it’s a must read.Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.
Bride of Rove summarizes Piketty-Saez thusly:
From what I gather they have been pulling together tax returns, tracking the rich and have determined that the rich have been getting richer faster than the poor have been getting unpoorer not so fast. Ok. I agree. It does take awhile to build that financial base and it tends to grow exponentially once you put that money to work. So if you have a lot, you make a lot proportionally. If you’ve got squat, you don’t tend to make much on nothing. You have to get a HS diploma, work hard, save and make good decisions. Sometimes you have to take a few risks. Eventually, if you keep at it, you will move up the scale faster and faster—except for now. But, yeah. There are poor people who never get ahead for a myriad of reasons and there are rich people who do better every year.Piketty and Saez believe that this is not fair.
They are making, as Henninger puts it, “a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.” As a consequence of President Obama’s belief in that argument,
Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.The “top 1%” isn’t just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to “pay for” the fact of their wealth—no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of “wealth” from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget’s “Top One Percent of Earners” chart.The White House says its goal is simple “fairness.” That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, “it is our duty to change it.”
In other words, the first thing you need to understand about this administration’s economic policy is that it’s not really about the economy. It’s not about prosperity or economic growth or even helping the poor in absolute terms. It’s about reducing the gap between the poor and the rich. And what’s the fastest way to do that? Make the rich poorer.In my book, this sort of thing boils down to letting the sin of envy drive economic policy—and envy is a deadly sin for a reason. It will probably accomplish its purpose; but it will probably also make everyone worse off in the process. That’s a high price to pay for seeing the proud humbled. It may well be God’s judgment on the proud of this nation, but even if so, I don’t think that justifies those who bring it about.