Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Will Darth Biden have to use the Force?

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Because there’s a rebellion afoot in the Senate, and the rebel base isn’t on Yavin or Hoth, it might just be right here in Indiana.  I always thought Evan Bayh was a Democrat I could respect, and now I think he’s gone and proved it:

This week, the United States Senate will vote on a spending package to fund the federal government for the remainder of this fiscal year. The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 is a sprawling, $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess.The Senate should reject this bill. If we do not, President Barack Obama should veto it. . . .Our nation’s current fiscal imbalance is unprecedented, unsustainable and, if unaddressed, a major threat to our currency and our economic vitality. The national debt now exceeds $10 trillion. This is almost double what it was just eight years ago, and the debt is growing at a rate of about $1 million a minute.Washington borrows from foreign creditors to fund its profligacy. The amount of U.S. debt held by countries such as China and Japan is at a historic high, with foreign investors holding half of America’s publicly held debt. This dependence raises the specter that other nations will be able to influence our policies in ways antithetical to American interests. The more of our debt that foreign governments control, the more leverage they have on issues like trade, currency and national security. Massive debts owed to foreign creditors weaken our global influence, and threaten high inflation and steep tax increases for our children and grandchildren.The solution going forward is to stop wasteful spending before it starts. Families and businesses are tightening their belts to make ends meet—and Washington should too. . . .Voters rightly demanded change in November’s election, but this approach to spending represents business as usual in Washington, not the voters’ mandate.Now is the time to win back the confidence and trust of the American people. Congress should vote “no” on this omnibus and show working families across the country that we are as committed to living within our means as they are.

For Sen. Bayh to write this in the Wall Street Journal is definitely a shot across the bow of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate—but he’s not the only hand at the linstocks.  According to Politico,

Moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate are starting to choke over the massive spending and tax increases in President Barack Obama’s budget plans and have begun plotting to increase their influence over the agenda of a president who is turning out to be much more liberal than they are.A group of 14 Senate Democrats and one independent huddled behind closed doors on Tuesday, discussing how centrists in that chamber can assert more leverage on the major policy debates that will dominate this Congress.Afterward, some in attendance made plain that they are getting jitters over the cost and expansive reach of Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget proposal.Asked when he’d reach his breaking point, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, said: “Right now. I’m concerned about the amount that’s being offered in [Obama’s] budget.” . . .Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who assembled Tuesday’s skull session, added that he was “very concerned” about Washington’s level of spending, especially in a $410 billion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the government until the start of a new fiscal year in October.As for the tax increases on high-income earners called for in Obama’s plan, Bayh said, “I do think that before we raise revenue, we first should look to see if there are ways we can cut back on spending.” . . .If the moderate Democrats in the Senate are willing to work with moderate Republicans—as Bayh said they are eager to do—they will negate the White House’s ability to portray opposition to Obama’s spending as partisan obstructionism.

I think we now know why Barack Obama didn’t pick Sen. Bayh as his running mate, eh?  Biden had best go grab the helmet . . .HT:  Jennifer Rubin

Some people don’t need PR

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Conservatives4Palin found an astonishing post on the Governor by a blogger who goes by the handle The Aged P, an infrequent poster but clearly someone well worth listening to when he does post.  I’m going to do something I rarely do and quote the post in full, because it would be a shame to chop up the analysis:

The one thing that Gov Palin has not been short of since the election has been advice from Republicans and the media—stand for governor again in 2010, go for the Senate, go for POTUS 2012, wait until 2016, write a book, go into the media, give up politics and concentrate on her family—the options are endless.As an outside observer, however, it strikes me that she is intelligent enough and shrewd enough to make up her own mind. I think that maybe she has already decided on a course – I believe she is going de Gaulle.General de Gaulle entered France alongside the Allies at the head of his Free French army after years of exile in London. Initially greeted as a returning hero by the French he served as the President of the Provisional Government but within two years he had resigned, disillusioned by the re-emergence of the old inter-party squabbles that had characterised the pre-war regime.For the next few years he led his own political party but, tiring of the political rat race in 1953 he withdrew from public life and retired in self-imposed internal exile to his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to write his war memoirs, and many pundits wrote him off as a man whose time had passed.His followers, however, retained their cohesion because they saw de Gaulle as a man of destiny who one day would be called forth from his exile by the people of France to rescue them at a time of great danger—which is exactly what happened in 1958 when France was torn apart by the Algerian crisis. The General returned to office but this time on his own terms and remained in power for the next decade.Since the Alfalfa Dinner Gov Palin appears to have chosen Alaska as her own Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, far enough away from the mainstream of US politics, concerning herself with her responsibilities as Governor and keeping a distance between herself and the spotlight, just as de Gaulle did in the 1950s. She has stayed away from CPAC, she did not attend the NGA, causing some irritation amongst some elements who would prefer her to act as some Joan of Arc type figure scorching across the lower 48 thrusting and slashing at the President and Congress. Staying out of the spotlight is not an option for some of these folk who often see politics as showbiz where your PR people will tell you that you have to be forever working on your next film or album to remain in the public eye.But the Governor does not need any of that—like de Gaulle she is so deeply impressed upon the public’s imagination that she needs no PR, she is simply there.De Gaulle was relatively unknown to the French people in 1940 but millions of them heard his broadcast from London at the moment of their deepest despair and in those few minutes he became the inspiration and hope for so many. Governor Palin walked onto the stage at the Republican Convention, electrified millions and stole their hearts forever with her grace, her honesty and her love of life sealing there and then a contract and covenant of support through fire and flood whatever may happen. Camille Paglia called her an immensely talented politician whose time had not yet come. But perhaps, one day, just as in 1958 with de Gaulle, a message will go across Canada to the north saying her time has come—and then the banners must unfurl . . .

Other than noting that Gov. Palin isn’t exactly in internal exile, but is in fact continuing to do her job as an effective and popular governor, I don’t think there’s anything here I’d argue with.  Click the link, give this man some traffic and leave a comment, because he’s produced a remarkable piece of political commentary here.And I agree with Ramrocks—that last sentence really gets me.

The limits of liberty

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“What exactly is liberty?  First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself.  In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage.  It was free to be alone.  It was free to sing.  In the forest its feathers would be torn to pieces and its voice choked for ever.  
Then I began to think that being oneself, which is liberty, is itself limitation.  
We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out,
we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.”—Gabriel Gale, in “The Yellow Bird.” The Poet and the Lunatics.  G. K. Chesterton

The anti-bipartisan chicanery continues

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Barack Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, suggested yesterday that the administration would consider using the budget reconciliation to pass its healthcare agenda and energy agenda (particularly their proposed cap-and-trade bill) by inserting that legislation into the final version of the budget.  It’s not that those bills are actually a proper part of the budget process—rather, it’s that the budget reconciliation (the final version of the budget agreed upon between the House and Senate after each passes its separate version) can’t be filibustered.  Orszag’s suggested tactic would allow the White House to pass major legislation without debate—and without a single Republican vote.At least, it would in theory.  In actual fact, as About.com’s Kathy Gill points out,

If Democratic leadership pursues this ill-advised plan, moderates do have an out. The out is a constraint on reconciliation that is called the “Byrd rule.” Named after Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the constraint means that if a Senator believes that a provision of the reconciliation bill is “extraneous” it may be subject to a point of order. After the Byrd Rule is invoked, at least 60 Senators must vote to waive the Byrd rule.

There are two things to be said about this.  The first is that the Byrd Rule is there to prevent exactly the sort of shenanigans that the Obama administration is contemplating, and that’s a very good thing; misusing the budget process in that way would just be wrong.

The budget process should be used to manage federal expenditures for programs that have been enacted by Congress. It’s bad enough that enabling legislation runs hundreds of pages and that there is no requirement of nexus (relevance). The budget is not the place to shoehorn policy changes that should be the subject of their own enabling legislation.

The second is that Gill’s point shouldn’t be news to Barack Obama.  Don Surber comments,

Perhaps if Barack Obama had spent a few days in the Senate instead of campaigning, he would know this.

You would think that a former member of the Senate would have more awareness of and respect for the proper procedures of the Senate than President Obama has so far shown.(Cross-posted to RedState)

Does God hide?

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Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.—Isaiah 45:13 (ESV)What are we supposed to make of this statement?  What does it mean?  It’s hard to say for sure, but I suspect there are three truths in view here. First, God could be said to hide himself in that he’s often not to be found where we look for him, in the ways in which we expect to find him.  God is not to be found in our conventional wisdom; he doesn’t do things in the ways that we expect, according to what makes sense to us, because he isn’t limited by our knowledge and understanding. That’s why the gifts he gives aren’t limited by our knowledge and understanding, either; that’s why he kept trying to give Israel something so much bigger than they wanted—he kept trying to give them the gift of being the ones through whom he would redeem the nations, when they just wanted him to help them conquer the nations. That’s why the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins spoke truth when he said, “If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity.” So often, the problem is that we’re looking for a god who makes sense to us on our terms; it’s not really that God is hiding from us, but that our expectations and assumptions are blocking our eyes and ears.What this means, in practice, is that God is not found by those who are unwilling to find him; he isn’t found by the proud and the haughty, by those who have all the answers, by those who are confident in their own strength to conquer life on their own terms. He isn’t found by those who aren’t really seeking him, who aren’t willing to surrender their lives to him; he isn’t found by the assertive and the self-sufficient. God is found by the humble and the contrite, by those who know they need him.This is why it’s said at times that he hides his face from Israel in judgment—Israel knows he’s there, not because they sought him and found him but because someone else did, but too often, they aren’t really seeking him at all, they’re only seeking his benefits. They want him to give them what they want while they disregard his commands, and so he hides his face from them, he turns away and leaves them in the silence until they will humble themselves and truly seek, not their own best interest, but his face.There’s another aspect to this as well, that in the ancient world, all the other gods had their statues; only the God of Israel, as far as I know, went without physical images for his people to worship. The nations around Israel expected to be able to walk into a temple and see the god—but in this, too, the Lord was (and is) a God who hides. This might seem like a minor point, but in truth it’s quite the opposite. The gods of the world can be represented, can be seen; the one true God can’t. In theological terms, he is transcendent—he’s so far above and beyond us that, as he tells Moses in Exodus 33, no frail, sinful human being can see him and survive the experience. He is too bright to see:  he is “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” That’s why the poet Henry Vaughan, in one of his finest moments, wrote, “There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness.”  God’s light is so bright that it overwhelms our ability to perceive it, and becomes to us instead the deepest of darkness. He is too bright, too big, too great, to be seen.And here, then, is the wonder, and here is the miracle: this God who was hidden from us in unapproachable light, this God whom no one could see and live, crossed that divide in his own power and revealed himself to us as Jesus Christ. This God who forbade us to make any image of him, who would not allow us to imagine our own version of him, gave us more than just an image of himself—he gave us himself, becoming fully human and living a full human life.When we talk about Jesus coming, we tend to focus on his death and resurrection—especially in this season of Lent—and there’s certainly good reason for that; and we focus too on all the things he taught, and that’s also completely appropriate. But I think we lose sight, sometimes, of the fact that those aren’t the only reasons he came; and that one of the reasons he came is simply that we might know him in a new way and be able to relate to him more closely. God will always be beyond our ability to fully understand, certainly and there will always be times when his face seems hidden to us. That’s just the way it is in this broken, sin-haunted, pain-darkened world of ours. But at the same time, even as it remains true that no one in this world has ever seen God in all his glory, yet it’s no longer true that no one has ever seen God: for as John 1:18 says, God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has made him known. The divide we could never cross, he crossed for us, out of love for us; in Jesus, the hidden face of God has been forever revealed.(Excerpted, edited, from “A God Who Hides?”)

“Send ’em up, I’ll wait!”

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This is too good not to post.  Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail passed along this conversation from an e-mail correspondent—it was apparently overheard on one of the air-traffic frequencies by a guy flying into Dubai:

Iranian Air Defense Radar: “Unknown aircraft, you are in Iranian airspace. Identify yourself.”

Pilot: “This is a United States aircraft. I am in Iraqi airspace.”

Air Defense Radar: “You are in Iranian airspace. If you do not depart our airspace we will launch interceptor aircraft!”

Pilot: “This is a United States Marine Corps F/A-18 fighter. Send ’em up, I’ll wait!”

Air Defense Radar: (no response . . . total silence)

Programming note

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I’ve been behind on posting sermons over on my sermon blog—I’d wanted to edit a couple of them from the audio to reflect changes in the preaching (something I don’t ordinarily do), but I haven’t managed to lay my hands on the recordings yet, so I figured I’d do better to just go ahead and post them as is.  I’m hoping to be able to post the audio as well soon, so perhaps I’ll just let that be enough.  In any case, I’m now caught up on the current sermon series; I’m not done with 2008, since I still have only one sermon up from the first series of last year, Being Church, but I hope to get the rest of those up soon.(Cross-posted at Of a Sunday)

This would be a high point in political geekery

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Jennifer Rubin reports,

Here at CPAC a well placed source with knowledge of the Republican Senate Committee plans tells me that Larry Kudlow is “considering” a Senate run against embattled Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd. Dodd’s approval ratings have been plummeting in light of the Friend of Angelo scandal and the ongoing effort to stonewall local and national media. Kudlow would bring instant name recognition and plenty of funding, but more importantly a wealth of economic knowledge. A debate between the two over the management of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae would be a thing to behold. Kudlow has been approached and is considering the possibilities.

I hope he does it; that race would be a blast to follow.  Rubin says it would be “the most entertaining and most educational senate race in a long time,” and if anything I think that undersells it; running against Sen. Dodd would give Kudlow the chance to put on a veritable clinic on the economy and the roots of our current problems (one of those roots being Sen. Dodd himself), and given his personality, I think it would be absolutely fascinating to watch him do it.  It would also give the GOP a real chance to steal the seat, since Kudlow would be nearly the ideal person to take full advantage of Sen. Dodd’s vulnerability (and would seem to have no qualms about doing so, not being one to pull his punches).Given the way Kudlow’s interviews with Sarah Palin raised her national profile and gave her the ability to show her stuff, do you think we’d see the governor return the favor by campaigning for him in CT?  That could be a lot of fun, too.Update:  Looks like Kudlow’s serious about this—he had dinner with Sen. John Cornyn, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to talk about it.

A God Who Hides?

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(Isaiah 45:14-46:13; Romans 11:33-36)

I said last week that Isaiah 45 is a hard chapter, that it digs into things that are neither easy to understand nor easy for us to accept; it deals with truths that are hard like granite, sharp-edged and unyielding as stone. There is comfort in these truths, but not comfort that comes to us on our own terms; it isn’t the comfort of an overstuffed easy chair in a warm room, but rather of the great stone wall that holds out the storm. It’s a comfort that does not promise to give us what we want, but rather asks us to trust God for what he will give; which is, I believe, a better thing in the end, but the truth of that is not always obvious. Indeed, it’s sometimes far from obvious.

Which fact, I think, sets up the last of the really hard statements in chapter 45. We begin this section of the book with another prophecy of the nations coming to Israel—focused this time on the peoples of northern Africa, where Israel had once been enslaved; now, those nations will come and voluntarily submit themselves to Israel, even to the point of making themselves slaves. Why? Because they recognize that the God of Israel is the only true god, and they’re willing to do anything—whatever it takes—in order to get in on Israel’s worship.

And then comes this statement: “Truly you are a God who hides yourself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” “Truly you are a God who hides yourself.” What are we supposed to make of that? It’s hard to say, because we don’t even know who’s speaking here. It’s just been the nations who were talking; is it still? Is this the response of the people of Israel to the promise God has just made? Is it the prophet? We don’t know. There are scholars who argue for each of those possibilities, but none of their arguments are all that strong; the simplest reading is that this is still the people of the nations talking, but that’s really not a great reason all by itself to come to that conclusion. In the end, I think we just have to accept that we don’t know who’s speaking here; it’s obviously not God, but it could be just about anyone else.

And in the end, perhaps it really doesn’t matter all that much. One of the reasons we don’t know who’s speaking in verse 15 is that nobody else argues with this statement—Isaiah doesn’t, Israel doesn’t, the nations don’t; whoever says it, it stands unchallenged. Which means that we should probably read this as a statement they all agree with, one that makes sense from all their perspectives, and see why that might be—and particularly, why it makes sense in this context. Taken by themselves, these words might seem bitter and cynical, but they clearly aren’t; they’re a response to a very good thing, to the nations discovering and coming to faith in the God of all creation, the Lord of the world. These words might be taken to mean that God plays games with people for some negative purpose, but that’s clearly not true either; God himself disclaims that in verse 19: “I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’”

What then does this statement mean? I suspect there are three truths in view here. First, God could be said to hide himself in that he’s often not to be found where we look for him, in the ways in which we expect to find him. From the perspective of the nations, this is the most basic meaning here: they didn’t find the true God working in any of the great nations of the world, playing the game of conquest. According to the way they understood things, that was how you knew which gods were greater than others; thus, for instance, when the expanding Babylonian empire conquered Assyria, that was understood as a victory not just for the emperor of Babylon over the Assyrian emperor, but also for Marduk, Bel, and Nebo, the gods of the Babylonians, over the gods of the Assyrians; by their conquest, they had proven themselves more powerful gods. The idea that there might be only one God, and that that God might be found not with one of the mighty empires of the world but with one of the small nations they had conquered, was a radically strange idea for the peoples of the world. Indeed, that idea was even a strange one to the people of Israel, to God’s own people, which is why God keeps having to make his case even to them, as he does again in this passage, that only he, not the idols of the nations, is to be worshiped and obeyed.

The problem is, Israel kept buying into the world’s conventional wisdom, that the power of God is with the strong, and worldly success is proof of divine favor; as a consequence, they kept concluding that the logical thing to do, the logical way to improve their situation, was to worship the gods of other nations as well as their own. This is a problem because God is not to be found in our conventional wisdom; he doesn’t do things in the ways that we expect, according to what makes sense to us, because he isn’t limited by our knowledge and understanding. That’s why the gifts he gives aren’t limited by our knowledge and understanding, either; that’s why he kept trying to give Israel something so much bigger than they wanted—he kept trying to give them the gift of being the ones through whom he would redeem the nations, when they just wanted him to help them conquer the nations. That’s why the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins spoke truth when he said, “If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity.” Because that’s so often the problem, that we’re looking for a god who makes sense to us on our terms; it’s not really that God is hiding from us, but that our expectations and assumptions are blocking our eyes and ears.

What this means is that God is not found by those who are unwilling to find him; he isn’t found by the proud and the haughty, by those who have all the answers, by those who are confident in their own strength to conquer life on their own terms. He isn’t found by those who aren’t really seeking him, who aren’t willing to surrender their lives to him; he isn’t found by the assertive and the self-sufficient. God is found by the humble and the contrite, by those who know they need him. This is why it’s said at times that he hides his face from Israel in judgment—Israel knows he’s there, not because they sought him and found him but because someone else did, but too often, they aren’t really seeking him at all, they’re only seeking his benefits. They want him to give them what they want while they disregard his commands, and so he hides his face from them, he turns away and leaves them in the silence until they will humble themselves and truly seek, not their own best interest, but his face.

There’s another aspect to this as well, that in the ancient world, all the other gods had their statues; only the God of Israel, as far as I know, went without physical images for his people to worship. The nations around Israel expected to be able to walk into a temple and see the god—but in this, too, the Lord was (and is) a God who hides. And while this might seem like a minor thing, it’s really anything but. The gods of the world can be represented, can be seen; the one true God can’t. In theological terms, he is transcendent—he’s so far above and beyond us that, as he tells Moses in Exodus 33, no frail, sinful human being can see him and survive the experience. He is too bright to see; that’s why the hymn we sang last week calls him “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” That’s why the poet Henry Vaughan, in one of his finest moments, wrote, “There is in God—some say—a deep but dazzling darkness”: God’s light is so bright that it overwhelms our ability to perceive it, and becomes to us instead the deepest of darkness. He is too bright, too big, too great, to be seen.

And here, then, is the wonder, and here is the miracle, to which Isaiah has already pointed in chapter 42: this God who was hidden from us in unapproachable light, this God whom no one could see and live, crossed that divide in his own power and revealed himself to us as Jesus Christ. This God who forbade us to make any image of him, who would not allow us to imagine our own version of him, gave us more than just an image of himself—he gave us himself, becoming fully human and living a full human life.

When we talk about Jesus coming, we tend to focus on his death and resurrection—especially in this season of Lent—and there’s certainly good reason for that; and we focus too on all the things he taught, and that’s also completely appropriate. But I think we lose sight, sometimes, of the fact that those aren’t the only reasons he came; and that one of the reasons he came is simply that we might know him in a new way and be able to relate to him more closely. God will always be beyond our ability to fully understand, certainly, as Paul says in Romans 11, quoting from Isaiah 40; and there will always be times when his face seems hidden to us. That’s just the way it is in this broken, sin-haunted, pain-darkened world of ours. But at the same time, even as it remains true that no one in this world has ever seen God in all his glory, yet it’s no longer true that no one has ever seen God: for as John 1:18 says, God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has made him known. The divide we could never cross, he crossed for us, out of love for us; in Jesus, the hidden face of God has been forever revealed.

The problem for Barack Obama

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This from Mark McKinnon:

Obama can never live up to his stratospheric expectations. He set the bar himself. But now he is realizing how hard it is to clear. He’s extraordinarily gifted. As gifted, perhaps, as anyone who has ever held the office. But in today’s world, gifted only gets you in the zoo. Then you have to tame the animals.