Remember, as you think about this photo, that Barack Obama considers Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. a friend, and is comfortable enough with him to call him “Skip.”It speaks well for Sgt. Jim Crowley that he’s solicitous of Professor Gates, helping him down the steps; I think it also speaks well of Dr. Gates, that he seems completely comfortable accepting Sgt. Crowley’s help. It seems clear that they’ve made their peace, and that’s good. It does not speak well of the president that he strides on ahead, oblivious.By way of comparison, here’s Barack Obama’s predecessor with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), who was neither a close personal friend nor a political ally:
I believe the contrast between these two pictures captures something real and significant about the contrast between these two men.
When Gates was shouting in the hearing of passerbys that Crowley was a racist, Crowley must have regarded this as a threat to his entire career. Allegations of racism could result in losing his job, being publicly disgraced, being unable to get another good job—the end of everything he’d worked for all his adult life.
Gates had much less to lose. His foolish mouthing off—in street talk, for goodness sake—at worst would get him a couple of hours in jail, as it did. That’s unpleasant, but even before being hauled off he could see a more-than-offsetting benefit: this could be the subject or the jumping off point for his next television documentary! Crowley had the power to put Gates in jail for a few hours, but not much else.
Gates, on the other hand, had the power to destroy Crowley’s career. And he seemed to enjoy wielding that power, or at least to be acting in reckless disregard of his capacity to destroy the professional life of another human being. Yes, Gates was jet-lagged and presumably irritated that he was locked out of his house. But the possibility that Crowley was a decent professional, not at all a racist, properly investigating a possible crime, doesn’t seem to have occurred to him. Crowley was just one of the little people, a disposable commodity in the career of an academic superstar.
This accounts well for something that rather surprised me: the swiftness and unflinching conviction with which Sgt. Crowley’s colleagues and the officials of his union stood up for him and stood behind him. I would have expected some of them to try to curry favor with Professor Gates, Harvard, the mayor of Cambridge, and the president, in the face of the radioactive allegation of racism—but none of them did. I think Barone’s right, that they recognized the real bigotry in the Gates-Crowley encounter, and though they didn’t play the victim, they weren’t willing to knuckle under to it, either.
As Barone put it, they refused to let “a Harvard swell . . . destroy one of their peers . . . on a totally specious basis for his own fun and profit.” Good on them. I don’t imagine there are a lot of Palinites on the Cambridge, MA police force—but they clearly have their fair share of strong, proud ordinary barbarians, and that’s a profoundly good thing.
A couple days ago I notedthe disconcerting failure of leadership(disconcerting to Democrats, anyway) shown so far by the president on the health care bill, which is after all one of his signature initiatives; I found it puzzling. Yesterday, Michael Barone offered an explanation that makes sense, and one that dovetails withsomething I’ve written before: Barack Obama isn’t leading the legislative process becausehe doesn’t know how. And why should he? He’s never done it. He’s had thetitleof a legislator, but he’s never reallybeenone.
He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.
In other words, he’s never done much work putting legislation together—especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people’s lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year—the stimulus, cap and trade, health care—the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.
The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn’t. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn’t. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or to insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn’t—and it still hasn’t made this basic policy choice.
I worried, during the campaign, about electing someone with no real record of substantive accomplishment—someone who knew how to talk about ideas but not how to realize them, who had no real experience getting things done; now, I think, we’re seeing the fruit of that. When his agenda runs into trouble, all he knows how to do to push it forward is talk; that’s why, asPolitico‘s Carol Lee pointed out,
He’s been in office only six months, but already there’s a strong sense of déjà vu around the way Americans are seeing and hearing from PresidentBarack Obama.
The president keeps returning to the samecommunications tacticsover and over, and all the pages of his PR playbook have one thing in common: a big dose of Obama.
His prime-time news conference Wednesday night, one of the standbys, brings his total to four. That’s the same number that George W. Bush did—in eight years as president.
To be fair to President Obama, he is handicapped by having to work with Nancy Pelosi, who’s proving a remarkably,perhaps historically, ineffective Speaker of the House. But every leader has to work with and rely on lieutenants who are less than they ought to be; effective leaders get the most out of those folks that they can and try to avoid putting them in a position where they can derail things. So far, anyway, that’s not Barack Obama. I’ve been saying that he’s a smart man and he’s bound to figure it out, but so far, he hasn’t; so far, all he’s managed to do is prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can’t spell “president” without “PR”—and he has the diminishing returns to prove it.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 9
Q. But doesn’t God do us an injustice
by requiring in his law
what we are unable to do?
A. No, God created humans with the ability to keep the law.1
They, however, tempted by the devil,2
in reckless disobedience,3
robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.4
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
After having considered the greatness and the extent of man’s sinfulness, disobedience and wretchedness, the Catechism concludes this division on human guilt by suggesting three possible objections. . . .
The initial objection concerns the Creator himself. Is not God unjust? . . . Is it right for God to require what man cannot do? But what is it really that God requires—a series of regulations and commandments and ordinances? Let us remind ourselves again that the entire law is summarized in one word: love! If man now has become a sinner, must God now say that it is no longer necessary for the sinner to love him? Of course not; God remains the same. His requirements do not change. But supposing this to be correct, can man fulfill the requirements of the law? The answer is No, but the answer was Yes! God created man able to perform and to do all the good pleasure of God. But Adam deliberately turned his back on God and disobeyed.
Dr. De Jong elaborates on this with the example of a contractor who agrees to build a home, then takes the money for materials and spends it on a drinking binge; he asks, reasonably enough,
Is it unjust for the original party to demand that his home be built? Can the contractor claim immunity because of his weak character? The contractor was given the means with which to build the house and willfully squandered them.
To be sure, asKuyvenhovenadmits (32), this doesn’t exhaust our objections on this point:
Still, we bristle in self-defense: That temptation happened . . . millennia ago. Why should we be doomed for what none of us remembers?
Here again, it’s a matter of perspective. We protest like individualists. But the Bible says that the very fact that we are able to think of ourselves as unrelated, disunited individuals presents evidence of our sinful perspective. God’s revelation views the human race not as a pile of gravel but as a giant tree. We are not pebbles thrown together but twigs and branches on a tree, all organically united.
We form a corporate unity. In many respects you and I have never doubted it. The national debts . . . are your and my debts. Yet when the debts were incurred, some of us were not yet born and none of us were asked. Similarly, the debt of the human race is yours and mine.
It’s an interesting illustration, since nobody really does deny our liability for the national debt; perhaps it’s because the corporate unity represented by the nation is visible, tangible, and human-created. It’s a reminder that, however hard we may try to avoid the fact, our responsibility in life goes beyond merely that for which we want toadmitresponsibility.
from a former president of the American Medical Association, Dr. Daniel Johnson Jr.:Memo to My Fellow Physicians: We Have Reached the Moment of Truth. It’s well worth your time, because he knows what he’s talking about and doesn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade; I found his thumbnail history of the debate over nationalized health care particularly interesting. Here’s an excerpt:
Now, with elderly, poor, women, and children covered, all that is left is a segment of the population outside of those groups that is reasonably self-sufficient and most of which has private insurance. Those folks will be forced into government coverage because of a “public option” plan that all intellectually honest observers, including both proponents and opponents of single payer, realize is a Trojan horse for a Canadian-style single-payer system. Once private insurance is crowded out by the unfair competitive tactics of the federal government intruding into an already flawed marketplace, it will be a simple matter to consolidate all of these different groups into one single entity.
What does this mean to physicians and their patients? “Clinical effectiveness research,” when operated by government instead of the medical profession, will become “cost effectiveness” restrictions on what care is available and to whom—determined by the federal government. It will only be a matter of a short time before Americans will enjoy the pleasures of “quality adjusted life years” wherein people my age will be denied services from which they might benefit because of their age and/or some other infirmity.
We don’t have to make this stuff up: It is already the law of the land in some other developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, and has been long advocated here in the U.S. by voices from the left, including major media outlets. The federal government will exert total control over payment for all medical services.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine what will happen when the payment-control mechanisms used by Medicare are extended to the entire private sector. The occasional inability of Medicare patients to find physicians who are willing to provide for their needed care at a loss will become the standard experience when the cost shortfall can no longer be shifted to the private sector.
Practicing physicians in the U.S. have become accustomed to the continued availability of ever better diagnostic and treatment innovations created by our academic and research colleagues. In my own specialty field of diagnostic imaging, the pace and breadth of scientific innovation to help us help clinicians be more effective in the management of sick and injured individuals or in the early detection of life-threatening illness, such as breast cancer, has been amazing. Yet I remember only too well the mid 1970s when the federal government and all but two states (Nebraska and Louisiana) did everything in their power to deny the American people access to the technology of computed tomography because of cost. As sure as the night follows the day, we will see that same kind of limitation imposed, but on a much larger scale. But in contrast to the ’70s, total federal control will prevent physicians and patients from overcoming the stricture as we were able to do back then.
Read the whole thing, and remember, this man is a good doctor: take his diagnosis and prescriptions seriously.
Much easier to do this back in my office with my books to hand, so I can add a few things to my post last night.
One, the plural ofbamahinIsaiah 14:14—to which the person who did the video refers in order to justify his back-translation ofbamah—is indeedbamatey; or better,bāmātê, since theyodh there isn’t functioning as a consonant but rather as a vowel marker. (Actually, the root word should really be writtenbāmâ, since the closinghēisn’t really a consonant either, but also just a vowel marker.)
Two, now that I’ve had the chance to sit down with theNew International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis(NIDOTTE to its friends), I can say with confidence that this conjectured back-translation is completely wrongheaded. The wordbāmâis used in several places in the OT in the stereotyped phrase “to tread/ride on the heights of,” as NIDOTTE says, “to express God’s absolute sovereignty over land and sea”; Isaiah puts this phrase in the mouth of the king of Babylon to express his arrogant presumption. The word isneverused to denote Heaven, the place where God dwells, however, and never would have been, since the primary meaning ofbāmâwas a place of worship (the “high places” that the kings of Israel/Judah are criticized throughout the middle OT for not taking down); the word for “heights” thatisused in this way ismārôm. Besides, if Jesushadusedbāmâ, we wouldn’t have to guess, since it actually passed into NT Greek in the formbēma.
Instead, looking at the semantic field, the word Jesus would have actually used would have beenšāmayim(or its Aramaic cognate), which is the word that actually means “heaven” (it’s paralleled with other words that mean “height,” “sky,” “firmament,” etc., but those words aren’t used by themselves to mean “heaven”). As such, evenkībārāq min-ûbāmātê, as little as that sounds like “Barack Obama,” is clearly not what Jesus actually said; the likeliest back-translation of the words “I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven” into Hebrew, rather, would behāzâ(orrā’â)ha-śātān kībārāq min-vešāmayim.
All of which is to say, the idea that Jesus said “I saw Satan as Barack Obama” is utterly unsupported by the facts, and unsustainable on the basis of any real understanding of Hebrew; it’s contemptible nonsense to fool the credulous and pre-deceived, nothing more.
Update:Shane VanderHart’s post on thison his blog,Caffeinated Thoughts, is also well worth checking out, as he adds some good points.
Ordinarily, I just ignore things like this; but for some reason, this idiot really irks me. (HT: Allahpundit)
This guy doesn’t even fall into the “knows just enough Hebrew to be dangerous” category, because he doesn’t actually know any Hebrew at all—or, indeed, much of anythingabout Hebrew. For all his pompous statement “I will report the facts. You can decide,” he’s precious short on facts andlongon false assertions. Watch the video if you want to, and then let’s go through it, if you’re interested. (If you aren’t, don’t bother to click “Read More,” just scroll down to the next post.)
One: “Aramaic is the most ancient form of Hebrew.” That’s about like calling French the most ancient form of Portuguese. Aramaic isn’t a form of Hebrew, it’sa different language—closely related, another Northwest Semitic language, but a different language.
Two: he relies on back-translations, which are necessarily conjectural, but presents them as if they were proven fact. Sloppy. Very sloppy.
Three:barackis the Arabic cognate of Hebrewbarak, which is also used as a name (so see Judges 4-5; “Barak” is the name of Deborah’s general).Barakmeans “he blesses” or “he kneels”; the wordbaruch, which we also know as a name, means “blessed” and is the noun form of this verb.Baraqmay sound the same, but it’s a completely different word, with a completely different root (beth-resh-qophinstead ofbeth-resh-kaph); the similarity in sound is meaningless, nothing but a red herring.
Four: the person who made this video is clearly unaware that the Hebrew alphabet does not have any vowels. During the post-biblical period a group of scholars called the Masoretes added pointing (a system of dots) to indicate vowels, to preserve the reading of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, but these are not original to the text. A couple consonants,yodhandvav, wereused in the original Hebrew to indicate certain vowels(hēwas also used this way at the end of words, much as we end words with “-ah” and “-oh”); the Masoretes included notations in their pointing system to indicate when these consonants were being, essentially, used as vowels.
Five: even ifbamah(or rather its Aramaic equivalent) was in fact the word Jesus used inLuke 10:18, as this video suggests, it would have been plural, not singular, and quite different in form (bamatey, I think; I don’t have my language tools with me at the moment, and Hebrew was never my strong suit).
Six: the individual who did this video declares, “the Hebrew letterwaw[orvav] is often transliterated as a ‘U.’ Some scholars use the ‘O’ for this transliteration. It is primarily used as a conjunction to join concepts together.”
This is wrong.
As I noted above, one of the ways in which Hebrew used thevav(and also theyodhand the he) was to indicate certain vowels; when the Masoretes came along to add vowel pointing to help people know how to pronounce the text, they came up with special points to indicate when, say,vavwas being used as a “u” (sureq) or an “o” (holem-vav), as opposed to when it was simply a consonantal “v.” (The technical term for those ismatres lectiones, or “mothers of reading.”) It is incorrect to say thatvav“is often transliterated as a ‘u’,” and still more incorrect to say that ‘o’ is a different transliteration used by “some scholars.” Rather, sometimes when the consonantvavis in the text, it’s serving as a “u,” and sometimes it’s serving as an “o.”However, this isdifferentfrom the use ofvavin the Hebrew conjunction, which is the prefixve-.
Now, that said, one of the oddities of Hebrew is that beforebeth,mem, andpe, the conjunction changes fromveto asureq, becoming a “u” sound, which is no doubt what the person behind this video is trying, however ineptly, to say. Again, though, “heights” is plural, and so even if his assumption thatbamahunderlies the Greek text is correct, it would not be in the singular form bamah, but in a plural form.
Thus, it is simply wrong to assert that Jesus, in talking about Satan falling from heaven like lightning, would have saidubama; it’s wrong even if you assume that Jesus would have used bamahto denote heaven, which is unproven. Thus, the last name of our president isn’t in the text of Luke 10:18 in any way. As for our president’s first name, while Jesus might have said baraq, that’s not the same asbarak. Plus, the person behind this video has forgotten that Jesus didn’t say, “I saw Satan fall lightning heaven,” but “likelightningfromheaven”—there’s a preposition before, and another one in the middle, and rest assured the one in the middle isn’t “Hussein.” It would be, rather, the Aramaic equivalent to the Hebrewmin-. The one before would be the equivalent to the Hebrew prefixki-.
As such, the closest to “Barack Obama” that Jesus could have spoken would have been something likekibaraq min-ubamatey. . . and that just isn’t good enough to support this farrago of nonsense that Jesus told us that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
Update:I’ve added a few key points to this argumenthere. I hate it when people misuse Scripture to their own ends; this is a particularly egregious example.
As thevitriol,invective, anddishonest attacksagainst Sarah Palincontinue to come from the Left, demonstrating thattheir determination to destroy herremains high—and as she continues to refuse to fight hatred with hatred and vitriol with vitriol, which is one of the reasons I support her as strongly as I do—I can’t help thinking yet again of what a disease hatred has become in our politics in this country. It’s hard to believe, from a rational perspective, that this is really what our politics has come to, that some people in this country hate others because they don’t like their views on tax policy, or immigration, or foreign policy, or gay marriage; but sadly, it has.
I can remember, more times than I can count, hearing people denounce George W. Bush as a thief, a liar, and an abuser of presidential authority, but most of the folks who made those accusations didn’t dislike him for those reasons. Sure, there were probablysomewho did, but for most, it was the other way around. That’s why is why people who wrote off President Clinton’s perjury then waxed furious against President Bush for lying to the American people—which if true put him in the company of FDR and Lincoln, among others—while others who wanted President Clinton impeached turned around to defend President Bush; it’s also why many who spent 2001-08 screaming bloody murder about “the imperial Presidency” and declaiming that the president should be impeached for “destroying the Constitution” are now perfectly happy as Barack Obama continues to expand executive power. If you want defenders of congressional prerogatives (outside Congress itself, anyway), you’ll have to look on the Right. The hypocrisy here—which is not confined to one side, by any means—is enough to make you gag.
The key thing about all these charges and denunciations is that people’s views of them tend to be defined by their politics, not the other way around. That’s why criticizing Clinton’s character never worked for the Republicans, and it’s why accusing Bush of lying didn’t work for the Democrats (it was the specter oflosingin Iraq, combined with the Katrina fiasco, that killed his administration): in our current political climate, for far too many people,only the politics matter.
Those on our side (whichever one that is) are the white hats who can do no wrong, and we love them; those on the other side are the black hats who do everything from evil motives, and we hate them. If the other side lies, cheats, and steals, we proclaim it from the housetops. If our side does, well, the other side reporting it just proves what rotten people they are. Not everybody takes this approach, of course—to give conservatives credit, the reaction to the Ensign and Sanford scandals has been encouragingly different in many quarters—but more often than not, this is American politics in the early 21st century.
Of course, this is nothing new; much the same could have been said about American politics across much of the 19th century, which gave us our first presidential assassination and most of the dirtiest presidential elections in our history. For that matter, it was nothing new then, either; so it has been, I expect, in pretty much every society or group thathaspolitics, at least some of the time. I’m not accusing contemporary America of any sort of new or different sin. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to do something about it—hatred is a sickness that could eat our country hollow from the inside, if we let it.
We need to start to fight this—and byweI don’t mean somebody out there, I meanus, the common folks, theordinary barbariansof this country. This isn’t going to be solved by politicians, or the media, or any of the rest of our country’s elite—from their perspective, that would be counterproductive; after all, as long as they canexploitthe hatred so many people have been taught to feel for their own ends, they’re going to carry right on doing so (and exacerbating it in the process). The only way to begin to break down this culture of animosity is to do it at the grassroots level,following the exampleof (of all people)David Mamet:
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. . . .
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.
We need to do the same with those who disagree with us—not to change our minds, but to build relationships with our political opponents and listen to them respectfully, such that they know that we take their concerns seriously and with real care for what they think and feel and believe; that’s the only way we’re ever going to convince those across the political divide to do the same for us. We need to set aside the goal of changing people’sopinions—that might happen, but it shouldn’t be the purpose of conversation—and seek instead to change the way peopleholdtheir opinions, by building a spirit of disagreement in mutual understanding and respect.
The more we can do that, the worse it will be for our politicians—but the better it will be for us.
Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 8
Q. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable to do any good
and inclined toward all evil?
A. Yes,1unless we are born again,
by the Spirit of God.2
Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.
This is the doctrine typically referred to as “total depravity,” and it’s one that confuses some people.Andrew Kuyvenhoven’s explanation(28) is helpful here:
Sin is worse than we are inclined to think, and salvation is bigger than any church can tell.
The Bible teaches that, by nature, people are “totally depraved.” This is again a technical term, and it might be helpful to say, first, what it doesnotmean. We don’t mean to say that people are as bad as they can possibly be. Most of the time, most of them are not. Neither do we mean that ordinary decent people cannot perform acts of kindness, helpfulness, courtesy, and so on. Many people do, and we thank God for the milk of human kindness and the paint of civilized surroundings.
By total depravity, we mean that sin has affected every part of every human being. . . .
The only solution to total depravity is total renewal. No person can do anything that is really acceptable to God unless he or she has a new heart.
The Christian life is a life of total dependence on the grace and the power of God. There is no “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” here, and no suggestion that if you just work harder, you can be good enough (nor the corollary that if anything’s wrong in your life, it must mean you’re not trying hard enough); nor is there any trace of the idea that to keep your salvation, you have tokeepworking harder. Rather, there is the call to joyful acceptance of our deliverance by Jesus Christ, who set us free from our slavery to sin, who took our death and gave us life.
Rebuild the parties? On why we might be suffering from an excess of democracy, in one respect.
Reclaiming the gospel? We have a remarkable ability to get our idea of Christianity backwards . . .
A bad week for Barack Obama The most recent polls show that a lot of folks who voted for the president are now questioning their votes, whether because of the Gates affair, because he’s governed as a hard leftist, or whatever; but everything we see now was foreshadowed during the campaign, for those willing to believe it.
A matter of trust “We hear God saying, ‘Obey me, obey me, obey me’; but what God is really saying is, ‘Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.'”
