Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Put not your trust in princes

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.
Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

—Psalm 146:3-7a (ESV)

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.

—Psalm 131 (ESV)

The tendency to put one’s trust in rulers and other political figures is, of course, a universal one, a temptation to which we’re all prone; it’s not just a problem in American politics, by any means. This is not a respect in which America is exceptional. I do think, though, that we’ve been taking it to unusual heights of late, and especially during this election season—and this isn’t just a problem for one side, either. Certainly a number of conservative pundits grumbled about the response to Sarah Palin, calling it nothing more than a bad case of celebrity worship, and I can’t count the number of e-mails I’ve received with subject lines like “We MUST Win!” Well, no, sorry, we mustn’t. I firmly agree it would be better if we did and that bad things will happen if we don’t, but what of that? Even if we’re right, it might very well be better for the long term that the Democrats have their day to do whatever they want. And of course, one must always be humbly aware that one could easily be wrong.

That said, trust in princes is a greater problem on the Democratic side of the aisle, at least this time around; the Obama campaign was built on it right from the beginning—not just in the messianic language about epiphanies and “this is the moment the planet started to heal,” but in the whole theme of his campaign. The basic appeal has been, from day one, “Put your hope in Obama.” When you do that, this kind of thing is the logical consequence (HT: Bill):

To that I say, no; even if I were voting for the guy, I wouldn’t do that. The man is a politician, and a Chicago politician, no less. Anyone who puts their trust in politicians—any politicians—is a fool in the full biblical sense, and I use the term completely advisedly.

Put not your trust in politicians, for in them there is no salvation. Vote, yes; vote wisely, yes; understand the issues and decide carefully, yes, yes, yes. And then leave the results to God. Do what you consider he leads you to do, but don’t presume to judge what MUST happen, or to conclude that if the results don’t go your way that God must somehow have failed. To know the future and what must be is too great and too marvelous for us. Calm and quiet your soul in the presence of God, and rest lightly in him; pray for the winners, and for the losers, and for all of us, and put your trust and your hope in the only one worthy of them: in the Lord. Put your hope in him alone for this troubled time, and for the time to come, and you will be blessed, for your help and your hope will be the one who “who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.” He takes care of his people, even when he leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, and he will take care of you.

The return of yellow journalism?

Posted on by | 2 Comments

To borrow a phrase from Isaac Asimov, future generations of historians will look back and somewhere in the last eight years, they will draw a line and say, “This marks the fall of the mainstream media.” (Always assuming the world lasts that long, that we don’t blow ourselves up or something.) Orson Scott Card, the science fiction/fantasy author and writing professor, lays out the reasons why in a blistering attack on the MSM: they’ve chosen to ignore some stories, downplay others, and spend their time inventing new ones, in order to advance the cause of their chosen agenda and candidates, and in the process have become “just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party.”This is not a new thing, nor should it be surprising. As my father-in-law pointed out to me a while ago, the rise of modern standards of journalistic integrity, of the idea that journalists should be fair and impartial and treat all reasonable points of view equally, was driven and made possible by the rise of mass media that made it possible for the first time to market products on a nationwide basis. If you’re going to try to sell things to the whole country at once, you need to appeal to the whole country at once, which means that for your news division, a convincingly impartial approach is necessary so as not to turn anyone off. As Jon Shields, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado—Colorado Springs, has pointed out, this was made possible by the consensus-oriented, largely unideological centrism of post-World War II American politics.The problem is, both of the foundations of that approach to journalism are gone; Dr. Shields’ article tells the story of how liberal activists shattered that 1950s centrism, and mass marketing has largely been replaced by niche marketing. You pick a segment of the population and you make money by giving them what they want; along with that goes telling them what they want to hear. The only things left of the grand postwar era of American journalism are the major media corporations it created, which are now in varying states of disrepair, and their abiding conviction that they are the arbiters of truth and impartiality. (Hence their flaming contempt for that upstart Fox, which challenges the latter and competes with them for money.) We on the outside are free to see that that conviction is an illusion—and always was, really—and that the man behind the curtain is the abiding form of journalism in a capitalist society, to which we have returned after a brief aberration. Call it yellow journalism if you like (I for one think that’s fair), but don’t be surprised by it; remember, the highest award for journalism is the Pulitzer Prize—named after, and established by, none other than Joseph Pulitzer.Remember, you can’t count on the media to tell you what’s true. You have to figure that out for yourself.

The far country, and the road home

Posted on by | No Comments

When you lay me down to die . . . just remember this: when you lay me down to die,
you lay me down to live.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”As I mentioned in my previous post, Sara and the girls and I went up to hear Andrew Peterson last night, which was a very great lift to our spirits. Before kicking into the songs from his new album, he opened with this one to set the theme. It reminded me of a time a couple years ago where I seemed to be surrounded by death. That was the time when Louie Heckert, one of the patriarchs of our little congregation and also one of the sweetest spirits I’ve ever met in a human being, was attacked and killed by a rogue bull moose; if you didn’t hear that story at the time, click the links—and even if you did, click on his name anyway, because if you didn’t know Louie, that was your loss. Around the same time, one of our long-time part-time folks died out in Missouri, as did two other long-time residents of Grand County for whom our church had been praying.To top it all off, my grandpa died at the same time, and his funeral ended up being the same time as Louie’s. As I was conducting Louie’s funeral, an old family friend was leading Grampa’s; and I could not break down, for Grampa or for Louie or for anyone else, because there were things that needed to be done. That, I think, is the hardest thing about doing a funeral, and the better you knew and loved the person who died, the harder it is: in order to honor Louie properly, in order to create the necessary space for everyone else to deal with their feelings of grief and loss, I had to keep strict control on my own. That’s just how it works. It doesn’t mean that the grief goes away, just that you don’t get to do anything with it.Nobody tells you when you get born here how much you’ll come to love it and how you’ll never belong here.—Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn”As hard a time as that was, the good thing was that it all happened just before Easter, meaning that we were able to respond to all these deaths with the celebration of the Resurrection, because that is God’s answer to death; as one hymn we sang that Easter morning declares, “Christ is risen, we are risen!” because in his resurrection, “Death at last has met defeat.” That is the anchor of our faith, and it’s an anchor we particularly need when the death of someone we love dearly rocks our world. It’s not just because we want the assurance that we will see them again or because we want to believe that they are in a better place, either, though both those things are part of the equation. At a deeper level, encounters with death remind us that no matter how hard we try, we really can’t make our home in this world, because we can never fully belong here; we are temporary, and the world goes on.God is at home. We are in the far country.—Meister EckhardtWhat we tend to forget, though, is that the world’s perspective on death is something of an optical illusion; in truth, it’s this world which is temporary. It wasn’t meant to be that way—it’s the result of human sin—but we live in a world which is going to be replaced. The reason we cannot be fully at home here is because this is not the home for which we were made; we were made to live with God, and we live in a world that has rejected him. Our sin, our insistence on our own way, has opened a chasm between us and God—and the tragedy is that as a result, we have created a world for ourselves that we can’t live in, a world which can never be our home. As the German mystic Meister Eckhardt understood, we have made ourselves exiles in the far country, for no matter how hard we try, our only true home is still with God.I believe in the holy shores of uncreated light; I believe there’s power in the blood.
And all the death that ever was, if you set it next to life, I believe it would barely fill a cup.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”Another of the small graces of that difficult month was the release of Peterson’s album The Far Country, from which this song comes. The album’s title was of course taken from the Meister Eckhardt quotation above, and the album is primarily a meditation on death and Heaven. As I listened to the album, and in particular to the song “Lay Me Down,” I was blessed by the strong affirmation of our resurrection hope from a non-standard perspective. The problem, really, isn’t that we die; the problem is that we aren’t at home, we’re exiles in the far country. In this far country, we die, and those we love die, and it brings us great pain; but God is still at home, and he is here as well in this far country with us, and he sent his son Jesus to make a way, to be the way, for us to get across the gap, to go home to be with him. That’s why we affirm that death has been defeated, that it has lost its sting, because by his death and resurrection Jesus has transformed it; it’s no longer the final curtain in this far country, but the door that opens onto the road back home.I’ll open up my eyes on the skies I’ve never known, in the place where I belong,
and I’ll realize his love is just another word for Home.—Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down”For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.—Philippians 1:21

The gospel is resurrection

Posted on by | No Comments

My last post, being focused on the political and international scene, could give one the idea that my concerns are solely with the impending regime change in Washington, DC. That isn’t the case, though. While the foreboding I’ve been feeling is certainly partly due to the political situation, there are a number of personal elements in play as well; I just have the sense of some combination of things coming together, and I don’t know just what, or to what purpose, and it’s been weighing on me.

That’s why Sara and I, even though we’re still feeling the effects of this stomach bug that swept through our family, decided we needed to get up to South Bend last night to see Andrew Peterson in concert. He’s touring solo (absolutely solo, without even Ben Shive) in support of his new album, Resurrection Letters, Vol. II (apparently Vol. I will be coming later), which released on Tuesday. It was a joy to hear him sing his new songs, and a lot of fun to hear him talk about the stories and Scriptures behind each of them; it was a greater joy to be lifted up by the theme running through them, the celebration of the power of the resurrection of Christ in our lives.

This is critically important, because the gospel isn’t about empowering us, or fulfilling us, or satisfying us, or any of that; all of those are effects of the work of God in our lives, but they aren’t its essence or its purpose. The gospel is about a living God raising dead people to life. We were dead without him, we are dead without him, we become less alive every time we turn away from him; and every time we do, his Spirit is at work in us to raise us back up out of the depths into which we keep trying to cast ourselves. He isn’t simply changing us, he’s remaking us, and indeed has already remade us; he’s making all things new, and he won’t stop until he’s done, no matter what this world might do to try to stop him.

This is the answer to my foreboding: whatever may come—for our nation, for our world, for me personally and my family—it’s all in God’s hands, and all accounted for in his plan. It’s all a part of him making us, and all things, new. It’s all a part of the process, begun and sealed in our baptism, by which he’s putting our old selves to death and raising us to new life in him. And in him, by his grace, though things may be dark and troubled along the way, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we need fear no evil, for he is with us; and we may be sure that in the end, as that great saint of the church Julian of Norwich put it,

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Scanning the horizon

Posted on by | No Comments

I’ve been feeling a real sense of foreboding lately. Part of it (though only part) is political, as anyone who reads this blog can tell, and so there’s definitely a component to this which is merely partisan: I’m convinced our next president is going to be a (very) liberal Democrat, and I don’t believe the policies which liberal Democrats support are best for America, which is why I typically vote Republican. That’s a matter of differences of opinion, nothing more; part of the deal in a democracy is that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and in the long run by the grace of God you hope it all balances itself out. So far in the history of this nation, in the long run by the grace of God it mostly has.

I don’t believe a liberal Democratic administration will be good for our economy, but that doesn’t really bother me; I’m probably too spoiled anyway, and even if the times wax comparatively bad, my family and I will still have things infinitely better than some of our friends elsewhere in the world. The children who will never be born due to liberal Democratic policies on abortion weigh far more heavily on me (and don’t try to argue the canard that GOP policies have raised the abortion rate—that one’s been thoroughly debunked), as do other likely changes on the social side. But even so, that’s politics; that’s how the system works.

What isn’t just politics is that I see heavy weather ahead. The “end of history” celebrated by Francis Fukuyama turned out to be nothing more than a Weimar holiday followed by the rebirth of aggressive fascism—this time in Islamic garb—as a major force on the world stage, the rise of China, the reassertion of Russian power, and the ongoing spread of WMD technologies. There are some nasty cancers growing in the global body politic, and they aren’t responding to herbal therapies. This isn’t helped by the current deflation of the global economy, which creates its own set of problems which must be addressed. From a political perspective, one may say that this candidate would be better than that candidate, but there is no conceivable candidate we could put up with the confidence that they would “fix the problems,” because the problems are simply too big. The situation of our world, as usual, is not amenable to a political solution, though it helps when politics at least manages to produce leaders who can move us in the right direction.

This is why what really bothers me about the upcoming election is not that we’re going to electa liberal Democrat, but that we’re electing one who I’m increasingly convinced is manifestly unprepared and unqualified for the job. I didn’t feel this concern four years ago, even though I had far less respect for either John Kerry or John Edwards than I do for either Barack Obama or Joe Biden, and even though I consider McCain/Palin a far superior ticket to Bush/Cheney, and even though I think the issues were just as serious four years ago as now. For that matter, if it were Hillary Clinton running with, say, Harold Ford, I would be far less concerned. Yes, several years ago, I wouldn’t have believed I’d say that, but between her Senate tenure and her campaign, she did a lot to change my opinion of her; and love her or hate her (there seems to be little middle ground), Sen. Clinton is someone who gets things done.

To be sure, I would have disagreed with many of the things she did over the next four years—as, I should note, I’ve disagreed with many of the things our incumbent president has done over the last eight, despite the (R) after his name—and I think her campaign has shown significant weaknesses in her administrative ability, and as such, I personally would not have considered her a good president; but I believe she would have been at least a moderately effective president, and possibly quite a bit more, and one whom Democrats would have judged successful. The key here is that I think Sen. Clinton is capable of saying with Orrin Knox (the fictional senior senator from Illinois in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent), “I don’t give a **** about being liked, but I intend to be respected,” and as such I believe she can stand up to people and face them down when the situation calls for it. This is a crucially important ability in a president, and never more than in their dealings with the leaders of other nations who bear America ill will.

I do not believe that any of these things can be said of Barack Obama (except that his campaign, too, has shown significant weaknesses in his administrative ability). He simply has no record of serious accomplishment—he’s never been an objective success in the world outside academia, except at campaigning and winning votes. My brother-in-law, an Obama supporter, assured me recently that he’s gotten a good education; my response was that I don’t question that (though I do wonder why he’s so determined to keep his time at Columbia hidden), but I don’t see that he’s done anything with it. He’s a writer, a thinker, a policy wonk; he’s the guy on the staff who makes a great advisor because he’s full of ideas, but has no instinct for turning any of them into reality. He talks about change, but he doesn’t create it; he talks about compromise and bipartisanship, but isn’t willing to give up anything to make it happen.

As well, and most crucially, he has no history of standing up to his own party, to his own supporters, to his own mentors, unless he’s driven to—and when it comes to conflict between them, as it did recently in Illinois between Gov. Rod Blagojevich and State Senate President Emil Jones (Sen. Obama’s personal kingmaker), he prefers to just avoid the scene altogether. To be effective as a leader requires the willingness to be disliked, to bear the full force of the anger and disappointment of others, and Sen. Obama shows no sign of that as far as I can see.

The thing is, before, it hasn’t mattered. He’s been one of a legislative body, and if he doesn’t bother to vote half the time, the votes will still be held and the business of the session will still go on; and if he doesn’t bother to convene his subcommittee, well, the legislature can work around that to get done what needs doing. And besides, there’s always a higher office to aspire to, and another campaign to run. What happens when he reaches the point when there’s only one of him, and the buck stops at his desk, and there’s nowhere else to go—but down? I don’t see anything to give me confidence in the answer to that question.

And so, my deep presentiment that it will not be well when this nation elects Sen. Obama to its highest office is not just about his conviction that offering ourselves to our enemies as their partner in addressing the problems of this world is a bad way to solve those problems (but a good way to get hurt). It’s not even, really, about my broader sense that his instincts in responding to people and situations point in all the wrong directions. These, again, are concerns at the level of political disagreement, and my unease runs deeper. Let me set them aside for the moment; let me go so far as to stipulate that Joe Biden is right, that when the crisis comes, we just have to trust Barack Obama because “he gets it.” My fear is that even if his instincts are in fact right and he does know the right thing to do, he won’t be able to convert that knowledge to action and actually do it in a successful way. That’s going to be an extremely difficult thing to do in the event of, for instance, my personal worst-case scenario: al’Qaeda setting off a suitcase nuke in or near the US Capitol. It would be difficult for anyone, because let’s be honest: the gap from knowledge to effective, timely action is one of the hardest for us to bridge in this life; one of the reasons why we need true leaders is their ability to do so consistently when it matters most. If Sen. Obama has shown anything like that consistency, I haven’t seen it—and I don’t believe it’s going to just show up when he needs it most.

Don’t think this means I dislike the man. I don’t; I’ve never understood anyway how you can dislike someone you’ve never met, but I see little in him to dislike. I see much that is admirable, and much that I believe would make him a joy to know. He’s clearly a very gifted man; if we were discussing him as, say, a potential SCOTUS nominee for another Democratic administration, I think he’d be hard to argue against. What I just don’t see is the kind of inner strength, resolve, and fortitude that it takes to navigate the storms of the presidency to a successful conclusion—and that worries me deeply. I hope I’m wrong; I’ll be praying hard that I’m wrong. But right now, I just don’t see it.

 

Worrisome thought

Posted on by | No Comments

Right now, those focusing on Iran are primarily thinking Iran vs. Israel, and understandably so. Another possibility struck me today, however. If I’m right that Barack Obama wins in two weeks, and if he sticks to his promise to begin an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, would that be enough to re-orient Ahmadinejad? Might we not see Iran wait until the withdrawal is well underway, and then invade Iraq? They would have good reason to, from both a tactical and a strategic perspective, if they thought they could catch us at a point when we couldn’t respond effectively; I very much doubt Iraq would be able to mount significant resistance on its own.

The case against Barack Obama, in his own words

Posted on by | No Comments

Guy Benson and Mary Katherine Ham, working with Ed Morissey, have put together a comprehensive closing argument against the election of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) as President of the United States; you can find it here. It covers abortion, tax policy, his judgment regarding his associates and advisors (and mentions his advocacy of prosecuting those who criticize him), his judgment regarding foreign policy, his willingness to look down on people, his willingness to play the race card, and his lack of accomplishments in office—and it’s copiously illustrated with video, mostly of Sen. Obama himself and his associates, advisors and supporters. Check it out. If you see everything he and they have to say and agree with all (or most) of it, more power to you; but you just might find he’s not the candidate you think he is.

The case against Barack Obama, in Joe Biden’s own words

Posted on by | 2 Comments

I haven’t yet written about Sen. Biden’s remarks in Seattle this past Saturday because I’ve been sick—I think it was Monday evening before I even did so much as turn on either the TV or the computer (which at least saved me from angsting over the Seahawks)—and I still don’t have a great deal of energy, but I’ve been rather astonished by them; I appreciate the points folks like Hugh Hewitt, Beldar (and also here), Bill Kristol, and Tom Maguire have raised in response, which I think are right on. Beyond my amazement at the extraordinary lack of political discipline shown by the Democratic ticket in fundraisers (it’s amazing that Sen. Biden actually thought it was a good idea to say what he said, but no more so than Sen. Obama’s comments in San Francisco last April), these are the things that really strike me out of all this:One, it’s one thing for me to project a major attack on the US in the first year of an Obama presidency, based just on reading the trends and the tea leaves; it’s quite something else when Sen. Joe Biden, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic Party—and thus one of the most thoroughly-briefed people in the world, a man who’s been told what almost no one is told—says so. It’s especially something else when he says the attack will come within six months and offers multiple threat axes. Folks, this isn’t just a prediction now, it’s the next best thing to a guarantee: if we elect Sen. Obama in two weeks, sometime next year, we’re going to get hammered. His own running mate assures us of that, and he’s seen as much of the playbook as there is to see.Two, Sen. Biden says, “I think I can be value added” because “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know”; this would be more reassuring if his partition plan for Iraq and his recent fantasy about the US and France kicking Hizb’allah out of Lebanon didn’t indicate that he’s forgotten most of what he knew about foreign policy as well.Three, Sen. Biden pre-emptively dismissed the idea that we have the military capability to respond to what’s coming. Saying this in public is nothing less than giving aid and comfort to the enemy; it’s something a braver age would call treason. Such remarks, should the Obama/Biden ticket win next month, will do nothing but embolden the enemies of this nation and make them more willing to attack us; whatever they might believe about our ability to defeat them, they will know that our leaders don’t believe we can defeat them, and that as a consequence they have half the battle won right there. That will only make them more willing and even eager to attack, because it raises the possible rewards and lowers the risk.Four, though I don’t think it’s as obvious as Hewitt thinks that this is what Sen. Biden is talking about, I think he’s right to say that

an Iran-Israel confrontation is coming, and that if Obama is president, America will sit it out with, at best, words that do nothing to support Israel or deter Iran. . . . A President Obama will blink when Iran threatens Israel by approaching the nuclear tripwire. A President Obama will seek to force Israel to live with Iran as a nuclear power capable of either striking Israel or shipping to Hezbollah the means of threatening the very existence of the Jewish state, and the supporters of Israel in the U.S. will be stunned and then angry.

I think he’s right because I don’t think Sen. Obama has the political will to do otherwise. As Dr. Victor Davis Hanson told Hewitt in an interview,

It’s easy to say, as Obama says, it’s a game-changer if Iran were to get a nuclear device. What does that mean, a game-changer? That’s intolerable. What he’s not telling you is that if I choose to make sure that they don’t have a nuclear device, then that means that basically the United States is going to have to impose an embargo or a Naval blockade because the Europeans will still try to profit to the 11th hour, or even a military strike. I, Barack Obama, must be hated by people in Berlin. There’s no more Victory Column great extravaganzas for me. There’s no more fawning interviews with Der Spiegel. It’s going to be hatred from those people. I’m going to be a unilateralist pre-empter, and I’m going to do that, and all the people in the Muslim world and the Arab world that love me and fawn over me are going to hate me as worse than you know what. Okay, I’m willing to do that for a principle. Do you think he’s going to be willing to do that, or John McCain? I’m sorry, but I don’t think that all of that cheap rhetoric about invading Pakistan and a game-changer in Iran is anything other than rhetoric, because I think the problem with Obama is he’s bought into the idea of Vero Possumus, the new presidential seal that he’s promulgating, that the seas are going to cease to rise, that the planet won’t heat up, this is the change that we’ve been waiting for. And he really believe in this Messianic sense that people love him for himself. And he’s not going to be willing to give up that easily.

Unfortunately, messianic leadership only works in combination with messianic wisdom and messianic humility—and those a) are only to be found in the true Messiah, the Son of God, and b) lead not to political victory but to death on a cross. As for messianic leadership without those other components? Well, that doesn’t lead to political victory either, but to true disaster.Five, Sen. Biden’s reason for saying all this to those folks in Seattle was to prepare them to hang in for a terrible two years that will see the Obama administration become terribly unpopular. I wonder if he’s followed that through to realize just how unpopular the Democrats in Congress will likely become as well? Certainly, everything he says supports my own thought that we could see a GOP tidal wave in 2010 wipe out Democratic majorities all over the place. (If so, all the more important that folks like Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, and the others who will lead the GOP going forward take the time to think long, hard, and deeply about how to address the issues our country faces, both domestic and international.) As Hewitt put it, Sen. Biden sees a crisis coming and “suspects that Obama will react to the coming crisis in a way that demoralizes the country and which shatters public confidence in Obama.” I’ve been comparing Sen. Obama to Jimmy Carter ca. 1976, but this is sounding more like the 1979-80 version of Jimmy Carter—and that’s not good news. It’s not good news at all.Six, obviously, Sen. Biden believes that in saying all this, he’s making the case for Obama supporters to stand strong behind their candidate. I don’t. I do believe, however, that he’s underscoring a very important reality. While I’m convinced that electing Barack Obama will only embolden our enemies abroad and weaken our strength at home, and thus worsen the problems we’re facing, these problems, on the whole, have little to do with Barack Obama. He hasn’t done anything to help them, but neither have most of his colleagues, and some of them he could do nothing about. They exist regardless, and will continue to exist regardless, and thus it would be far too facile to say that electing John McCain would mean that we get to avoid them. We don’t. I believe we’ll see better economic policies if he wins, but this will still be a turbulent and trying time for our economy no matter what; and while I believe foreign enemies such as Iran and al’Qaeda will be far more circumspect in the face of a President McCain than a President Obama, they’re not going to just pack up shop, go home, and sit out the next four years if he wins. Far from it: they’ll be working to bring us down either way, and they’ll be a clear and present danger to us either way.All of which is to say: whoever wins, fasten your seatbelts—we’re in for a bumpy ride, and a long, long night.Addendum: here’s what Gov. Palin had to say in response to Sen. Biden’s remarks: