Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Clearing out the links drawer

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Here are a few things I’ve been meaning to get around to posting on (for quite a while—I think I ran across all of these back in March) that just aren’t likely to get their own posts at this point; so I’ll toss them out for your interest, and if I ever do get around to putting up a longer post on any of them, well, the duplication won’t hurt anything.

Beryllium 10 and climate
The science in this is not immediately transparent to the non-specialist, but it’s interesting evidence that climate change is far more about what the sun does than about CO2.

A Dozen Sayings of Jesus That Will Change the World—If Christians Ever Believe Them
Dan Edelen’s always challenging—sometimes problematically so; this is a post that ought to make Christians in this country uncomfortable.

Generational Disconnect
Chaille Brindley has put his finger on a real need in the American church.

Anatomy of an Internet Joke
I think this post by James Wallace Harris fits very well with Brindley’s comments.

“Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable”

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“and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” I’ve always loved this song; it strikes me as deeply confused in its conclusion but insightful in its observations, and I’m a sucker for a great folk-rock hook.  I hadn’t thought of it in I don’t know how long until it popped into my head this morning, and I’ve watched the video several times today already.

As it happened, after I watched it the first time, I flipped over to my Facebook account to find Sarah Palin’s official statement on the murder of George Tiller, about which I’ve blogged here and here.  I think the conjunction was appropriate.  I don’t know what Saliers was focusing on when she wrote those lines, and I’m reasonably sure that neither she nor Amy Ray share my position on abortion (or much of anything else, except maybe folk music), but I couldn’t help thinking about them as I reflected on the case of Scott Roeder, the man who shot Tiller.  If this is who the authorities think he is, he’s been involved in anti-government activities and anti-abortion protests for a couple decades now; it sounds like he started out motivated by a real desire to do something about some of the evil and injustice in the world, and along the way, got twisted into fighting evil with evil.

That happens all too easily, if we’re not careful.  It’s all too easy to start accommodating evil, just a little, on the theory that the end justifies the means; but each act of accommodation makes the next just a little bit easier, and makes it seem just a little bit more necessary—and over time, the pace of accommodation increases, until finally it isn’t really even accommodation anymore, because we’re being transformed into the very thing we once despised.  It happens all too easily, because it’s always easier to roll down the slope than to climb up it, always easier to destroy than to create, always easier to justify our actions than to repent of them . . . except by the Spirit of God, this is the immutable truth about our souls:

Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable, and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.

Left to our own devices, we lose the call, wander off the path, and are ultimately devoured by the darkness.  We may not all do so as dramatically as Scott Roeder—or, for that matter, George Tiller—but there but for the grace of God go we all.

Since the Left is throwing the word “terrorism” around

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when it comes to the Tiller assassination, as Michelle Malkin points out, let’s see if they apply it to this guy, too; let’s see if they have the intellectual honesty, consistency and integrity to paint the anti-war movement with the same brush they want to use on the pro-life movement.  On the facts, it’s certainly every bit as warranted; somehow, though, I’m betting not.

Update:  Robert Stacy McCain has a great comment on this over at Hot Air‘s “Green Room”:

The Left always wishes to distance its own utopian idealists from the injustices perpetrated in pursuit of those ideals, while the Right is forever compelled to apologize for crimes that no conservative ever advocated or endorsed. It ought not be necessary to insist on the point that free speech and political activism are different things than the murder of Dr. Tiller, a crime that Michelle Malkin rightly denounces as terrorism.

Update II:  My initial expectation that the killer was an American anti-war activist was incorrect—he was, rather, an American convert to jihadist Islam.  See above.

Sarah Palin weighs in

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A couple hours ago, Gov. Palin released the following statement on the murder of Wichita abortionist George Tiller:

I feel sorrow for the Tiller family. I respect the sanctity of life and the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life. This murder also damages the positive message of life, for the unborn, and for those living. Ask yourself, “What will those who have not yet decided personally where they stand on this issue take away from today’s event in Kansas?”

Regardless of my strong objection to Dr. Tiller’s abortion practices, violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message.

For my thoughts and comments on this, see my post this morning on Conservatives4Palin.

George Tiller assassinated; may God have mercy on his soul

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For those unfamiliar with Tiller, he was an abortionist in Wichita who had become over the years, as the New York Times put it, “a focal point for those around the country who opposed [abortion],” largely because his clinic “is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.”  He was shot in his church, where he was serving as an usher.

I’d missed this story earlier today, and I expect I’ll be processing this for a while, but I’ve seen several reactions with which I agree wholeheartedly.  Most basically, Princeton’s Robert George was right to say,

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. . . . By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller’s life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our “weapons” in the fight to defend the lives of abortion’s tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Robert Stacy McCain had some equally wise and true words:

One reason I so despise such criminal idiocy is that, as a student of history, I cannot think of a single instance in which assassination has produced anything good, no matter how evil or misguided the victim, nor how well-intentioned or malevolent the assassin. . . .

Those who slew Caesar did not save the Roman republic. Marat’s death only incited the Jacobins to greater terror. Booth’s pistol conjured up a spirit of vengeance against the South more terrible than war itself. Assassination is an act of nihilism. Whatever the motive of the crime, the horror it evokes always inspires a draconian response, and involves other consequences never intended by the criminal.

He also notes,

Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom has some excellent comments as well:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder. It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers. It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation that the Obama Justice Department decided to drop ex post facto. There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there? If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes? Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments? Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Donald Douglas is right to complain about Andrew Sullivan’s selective outrage. . . . This sorry episode should be an example of how absolute is the sanctity of life; unfortunately, that’s not what people will teach, and that’s not what people will learn.

The president, of course, has weighed in with a condemnation of the assassination; that’s part of his job, and it’s unquestionably warranted.  That said, I have to agree with the folks at Stop the ACLU about this:

On one hand, Obama is correct. We cannot solve the abortion issue, or others, through murder. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. On the other hand, Obama never seems to work up much shock and outrage at the murder of over 2 million babies every year, many of them during the 3rd trimester. I wonder why?

Finally, go read Sister Toldjah’s superb post, which I’m not going to try to excerpt.

I’m not going to try to match these folks for profundity (not at the moment, anyway), or repeat what they’ve written, except to say that I agree with them; what Tiller did was evil, and what his killer did was evil.  Those who argue for this sort of violence claim to be agents of justice, but that cannot be—it’s a response to injustice that is itself unjust, and an action that denies its own premises; you cannot kill abortionists without undermining your argument that abortion is wrong.  It’s ultimately, inherently, necessarily self-defeating—which is characteristic of nihilism, one reason I think R. S. McCain’s diagnosis is spot-on.  It’s also not the way of Christ, who defeated evil by surrendering to it, not by leading a paramilitary team to assassinate Herod.

And so, for whatever it may be worth, I do categorically and unreservedly reject and abhor the assassination of George Tiller; and though as a Protestant I don’t believe in praying for the dead, I do honestly commit myself to hope that God will have mercy on his soul.  No, he doesn’t deserve it—but then, neither do any of the rest of us.

Obama administration ticks off Brits . . . again

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. . . Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be the administration that was so in tune with the international community that they’d make us popular around the world again?  So far, it doesn’t seem to be working, at least where the UK is concerned; Barack Obama has been doing a good job of ticking off our (historically) closest and most reliable ally since his second month in office, and now his (overmatched) press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has just made matters worse.  Apparently Gibbs didn’t know that deliberately antagonizing Fleet Street is a bad idea, or he wouldn’t have said this:

“I want to speak generally about some of reports I’ve witnessed over the past few years in the British media and in some ways I’m surprised it filtered down,” Gibbs said.

“Let’s just say that if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper,” he continued.

“If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not sure that would be the first stack of clips I picked up.”

Mind you, that arrogant, petulant little tantrum was in response to a single article in theTelegraph.  One article, and he can’t take the heat.  I hate to see what Gibbs would do if his boss ever had to take the volume of abuse, calumny, and slander that Sarah Palin gets.

Not only does this not speak well about Gibbs’ emotional maturity and ability to deal with criticism (and perhaps that of his boss, for that matter), it says very bad things about his judgment.  Actually, what it suggests is that he’s gotten so accustomed to the craven, supine submission of the OSM that he takes that as his due, and thinks everyone should cower before him likewise.  He reminds me rather of Prince Rabadash, actually:

Then Rabadash rolled his eyes and spread out his mouth into a horrible, long mirthless grin like a shark, and wagged his ears up and down (anyone can learn how to do this if they take the trouble). He had always found this very effective in Calormen. The bravest had trembled when he made these faces, and ordinary people had fallen to the floor, and sensitive people had often fainted. But what Rabadash hadn’t realized is that it is very easy to frighten people who know you can have them boiled alive the moment you give the word. The grimaces didn’t look at all alarming in Archenland; indeed Lucy only thought Rabadash was going to be sick.

Unfortunately for Rabadash Gibbs, the British press are the Archenlanders in this scenario, and they aren’t about to be cowed, as the Telegraph‘s James Delingpole made abundantly clear with this response to Gibbs’ comments:

Your treatment not just of the British media but of Britain generally smacks of a risible ineptitude. First, you let President Obama send back the Winston Churchill bust. Then, you insult our visiting prime minister with a dismally low-key reception (worthy of a minor African head of state, not your closest and most loyal ally) and shoddy gifts (those DVDs). Then you compound the insult by having one of your monkeys declare, Chicago-politics-style, “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.” OK so we know Obama’s not much interested in foreign affairs and has a special loathing for Britain because it roughed up his Kenyan granddad during the Mau Mau insurrection. But don’t you realise, that one of your jobs as his press secretary is to make out like he loves us so much even his underpants have a union flag on them? . . .

We know we’re not angels. We know we can go over the top sometimes. But unfortunately that’s a much bigger problem for you than it is for us. You see, while a lot of your mainstream media will hold fire on stories which they think may reflect poorly on your wondrous Obamamessiah—what his half-brother has been up to, say—we have fewer qualms about telling it like it is. So far, you’ve had a pretty easy ride. . . . But just you wait till we start showing our teeth. . . .

A lot of Americans know this. They appreciate our irreverence. They enjoy our frank criticisms of all the myriad areas where Obama is getting it so badly wrong—everything from his disastrous cap and trade measures, to his brutal treatment of Chrysler dealerships which didn’t support him, to his pork barrelling, to his failure to do anything that looks remotely like rescuing the US economy. That’s why they come to read us online: because they can and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

If Delingpole opted to hit the press secretary and his administration low, Nile Gardiner decided to swing high:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Robert Gibbs’ completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.

For all its talk of “raising America’s standing” in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America’s public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs—you’ve just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President’s message.

Even given Gibbs’ previously established (low) standard of competence, this is a most remarkable fiasco; but the most remarkable thing is that no one at the White House seems to recognize it as such.  Barring a groveling apology from the administration to the British media (and Britain more generally), I think we’ll have to conclude that the solipsism and self-absorption of this administration is so great that they really honestly don’t see the harm in antagonizing the Brits.  If that’s in fact the case, it’s going to come back and bite them in the end.  Badly.

Front-line leadership vs. rear-echelon dithering

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So North Korea is testing nuclear warheads and long-range missiles—and announcing that they will no longer abide by the armistice that ended the Korean War—and so far, Sarah Palin is sounding more presidential about it than Barack Obama.  Maybe back during the campaign when she stressed the significance of Alaska’s position on the front line of America’s defenses as support for her readiness to deal with foreign policy, she wasn’t just talking through her hat; whether it’s the fact that Alaska is now in range of a North Korean nuke or not, she certainly seems to have more of a grasp of the strategic realities here than the president does, even when limited to 140 characters:

More N Korea nuke tests: why consider US missile program cuts now? AK military program helps secure US. Now is NOT time to cut our defense.

Check out this good read on N. Korea that sheds light on need for strong US defense tools & economic sanctions. http://tinyurl.com/oaf2rm

Must Read: Here’s link to article concerning N.Korea’s missile range & progress.http://tinyurl.com/kre9lh

Yet as North Korea accelerates its pattern of provocations, the governor of Alaska may be standing firm, but the Obama administration can’t even make up its mind whether Kim Jong-Il is a threat; they may declare that “The United States will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state,” but they don’t seem willing to do anything more than “respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’”  The situation is critical, but the White House seems to want nothing more than for North Korea to recede back below the threshold of public consciousness so they can get back to more important things (like rescinding some of the restrictions on lobbyists that President Obama announced with such self-righteous, self-aggrandizing fanfare back in January).  “Speak softly and carry a big teleprompter,” indeed.

By the Power of the Spirit

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(Ezekiel 36:23-28; Acts 2:1-4, Galatians 5:16-26)

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned a conversation we had around our table at the presbytery’s leadership training event. Rick and Sue and I were sitting that morning with, among other people, one of the co-executives of our synod, who made a most interesting comment. We were talking about the difference between the experience of the people of God in the Old Testament and ours today, that we have the Spirit of God where they did not, and this chap noted that we often don’t want to talk about that, or even think about that. I think, as I said before, that our reluctance is driven in large part by fear—our fear of letting go, giving up our sense of control over our lives and letting the Spirit lead us—and that’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because it keeps us from experiencing the full reality of our redemption and our new life in Christ, part of which is being set free from fear; we wind up living as if we had no more power than anyone else in this world, but a higher standard to live up to. That makes trying to be Christian a painful slog, rather than the easy yoke and the life of joy and peace that Christ promises us.

Unfortunately, this is an area in which our tradition isn’t a great help to us; as a pastor I knew in college put it one time, Presbyterians believe in doing things “decently and in order,” and forget that when Paul uses those words, he’s talking about the proper place of prophecy and tongues in worship. The idea is that there needs to be a balance, so that the church doesn’t descend into emotionalism and chaos, on the one hand, but there’s room for the Spirit to move, on the other. I think a lot of times people who aren’t Pentecostal or charismatic look at those churches and just see emotionalism and chaos—and sometimes they’re right, to be sure; I’ve endured services like that—and overreact in the other direction, shutting off the Spirit. We don’t have a very good feel for the middle ground, because we don’t have a very clear idea of why we need the Holy Spirit; we have this vague idea that the Spirit is supposed to make people jump up and down, fall over, and say things we don’t understand, and maybe that frightens us, and we really don’t understand the Spirit’s work beyond that. Those sorts of manifestations are particular signs of the Spirit’s presence and activity, but in most cases they aren’t the point of the Spirit’s presence and activity; in focusing on them, we miss the forest for the trees.

In truth, the work of the Holy Spirit in and among us is far broader and deeper and more important than just the flashy stuff. There’s a reason that God’s final solution to his people’s unbelieving disobedience is, “I will put my Spirit in you”; there’s a reason that the conclusion of Christ’s work and the birth of the church as the new Israel is the fulfillment of that promise, as the Spirit is poured out on all of Jesus’ disciples. Everything that we say is true about life in Christ is true in us and for us because of the Holy Spirit; it’s the Spirit who unites us with Christ and holds us in the presence of God. It’s the Spirit of God who makes all things possible. Take out your Bibles, or pull out the Bible there under the pew in front of you, and let’s look at some of this reality.

First off, look at what Jesus says in John 14:26: “The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” Wait a minute—didn’t Jesus teach them all sorts of things? Yes, but remember, they never really understood—they didn’t get it; they couldn’t. It was only when the Spirit came to remind them of everything Jesus had said and to teach them what it all meant that it actually made sense to them. That’s why Paul talks in Ephesians 3 about “the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.”

Reformed types like to talk about “the perspicuity of Scripture”—the idea that anyone can read it and understand it, you don’t need a priest to tell you what the Bible means—which is good, sort of. Certainly, you don’t need a priest, but that’s not because Scripture is all so easy that a child could understand it, or that any unbeliever who picks up the Bible is immediately going to see Jesus. No, Scripture is clear because the Holy Spirit speaks through it and makes it clear to us; it is by the Spirit’s light that we understand, and that we see that this word contains the living Word, Jesus Christ.

Next, take a look at John 3:5-6: “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you the truth, unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.’” Jesus says this as he’s explaining to Nicodemus why he said, “You must be born again”; it’s the Spirit who accomplishes this by uniting us to Christ in his death and resurrection, as Paul says in Romans 6:3-7: “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be rendered powerless, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” It is by the work of the Holy Spirit that the death of Christ on the cross becomes for us and that the new life of his resurrection becomes ours, so that we become sharers in his kingdom; it is the Spirit who unites us to Christ as members of his body.

This means that we have fellowship with God—which is to say, he has made us his friends and invited us into his presence—as John says in 1 John 1:3; this is why, a little later on in that letter, in 3:1, John writes, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God—and that is what we are.” And then again in verse 24, John says, “Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: we know it by the Spirit he gave us.” It is the Spirit who brings us into this fellowship with God, and who is the sign of that fellowship—who is the proof that God lives in us, and that we are alive in him. It’s through the Spirit that we have access to God in prayer, and through him (as Paul says in Romans 5:5) that God has poured out his love in our hearts.

Something else Paul says is that the Spirit is our assurance that God will be faithful to give us all that he has promised—he describes the Spirit as the deposit that guarantees our inheritance. In 2 Corinthians 5, he writes, “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling . . . so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” Then again in Ephesians 1:13-14, he says, “You also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.” Last week, of course, I focused on that last phrase, but here, take a look at how the Spirit is described: he is the seal of our salvation, the one who signifies that we are in Christ, and the guarantee that we will receive the inheritance God has promised. He is our assurance that we are saved, and that our salvation is sure.

I could go on like this—the Spirit is the one who gives us the abilities and talents we have, so that we may use them for his glory and the work of his kingdom on earth, something Paul talks about in several places; the Spirit prays in and for us, Paul says in Romans 8:26-27, according to the will of God, “with groanings too deep for words”; the Spirit inspires us to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to others, something we see a great deal in the book of Acts. I had originally thought to use these last few weeks to do a sermon series on the Holy Spirit, but there just weren’t enough Sundays to do a full series justice, if we started looking into these various things in detail. Maybe next year we’ll come back to that. 

For the moment, I hope you’re beginning to see how the Spirit is involved in every part of our lives as Christians, and how everything that we affirm is true by the Spirit’s work; and in particular, if you’ll look at Galatians 5, that the end goal of the Spirit’s work in us is transformation. The Spirit prods us to grow, and that growth produces fruit, and that fruit is the seed of further growth in our lives by the power of the Spirit, and so over time we are changed; and the more we change, the more we become like Christ, and the more our hearts are prepared for that day when we will stand in his presence and see him face to face.

And note two things about that: first, this is the Spirit’s work, not ours. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control—these are the things that ought to characterize us as Christians, but we can’t live a life filled with these qualities in our own strength. Some of them we can teach ourselves if we try really hard—self-control, for instance—but only at the expense of other things, and some of them are beyond our ability to do by force of will. Peace might be the best example of that. Trying to work on all eight of them at once would simply be too much for us, even for those with the strongest wills, and it would inevitably fail, in one way or another. To live this kind of life, we must live by the Spirit, and let the Spirit produce these qualities and virtues in us by his power.

Second, part of this is not gratifying the desires of the flesh. This means that yes, there is a moral component to living by the Spirit—there are those in the church who insist that God can’t possibly want us to live up to any standards of behavior that we don’t like, particularly when it comes to sexual morality, but that simply isn’t true—but it goes beyond what we think of as morality, because again, this isn’t just a matter of outward behavior. As Paul makes clear, this is about a complete change of perspective and orientation, giving up the orientation that we’ve learned from the world and accepting a whole new orientation that points us toward God. It’s about not merely resisting the desires of the flesh, but surrendering them to God and allowing his Spirit to give us new desires; it’s about letting God teach us by his Spirit to want what he wants for our lives.

So then, if this is God’s work in us, and nothing we can do in our own strength, what’s our part in it? Are we called to do nothing? No; our part is to cooperate with what God is doing in our lives. The most important thing we can do is simply to make this a priority, to put time with God first on our to-do list. The Spirit is always at work in us, whatever we may be doing, but some of the things we do are more congenial to that than others—and of course, when we choose to sin, we’re deliberately working against his work in us. It’s important, if we want to grow in our faith, to make time to pray, and read Scripture, and think—to spend time intentionally focused on God, intentionally opening our minds and our hearts to hear his voice and listen to what he has to say.

Wow . . . liberal writer takes hatchet to Barack Obama

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I can’t say I’ve ever been very aware of Ted Rall, but apparently he’s a syndicated columnist and editorial cartoonist of some significance; apparently he’s also an atheist and very liberal, but apparently willing to call out Democrats if he thinks they have it coming, rather than take the party line as a straightjacket.  I think he does a remarkable job of proving that with this column (HT:  Mark Hemingway):

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now—before he drags us further into the abyss.

My oh my.  I’m not sure any conservatives have dared to cut loose with a broadside like that (and if they had, they would have been torn to shreds for it by the OSM); to read this coming from a liberal is nothing short of amazing.  But then, I think the issue that provoked him to this point is one on which liberals and conservatives should agree, and unite in opposing the White House:

I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK. . . .

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime”—contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

He’s right about that; this proposal would be exactly the sort of banana-republic behavior I’ve been worrying about (as in this post) ever since the campaign, given some of the tactics we saw from Barack Obama and his flunkies then.  In truth, the whole idea here is profoundlyilliberal, and really rather hard to explain.  Either President Obama is one of those folks who has a sneaking hidden admiration for totalitarian techniques (something more common on the Left than one would think, as we saw with Code Pink and other leftist organizations when they snuggled up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or else this is his solution to the dilemma he faces.  After all, if he’s committed to giving captured terrorists the same rights as any American, and giving them the rights Americans have now would be a threat to national security, what else is he going to do?

The question is, will people go along with it?  Not if Rall has anything to say about it, we won’t—and again, it’s hard to argue with his point:

Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Rall is here addressing the issue of terrorism, but this is in fact a much broader concern and temptation in jurisprudence, perhaps especially with regard to sexual predators—if preventive detention ever becomes a reality in the American criminal-justice system, it won’t be long before the clamor arises to have it applied to violent rapists; there are more than a few people even now who think it would be perfectly appropriate to pre-emptively imprison folks like that until they’re too frail to feed themselves.  (Science fiction plays with this theme at various points; the apotheosis of this would of course be Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” and the 2002 film based on it, with his concept of the “Precrime” unit that identifies and arrests criminals before they commit their crimes.)

All of this leads Rall to a remarkably strong statement:

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

Now, the conclusion that President Bush was a terrible leader is Rall’s, not mine; I don’t happen to think he was.  I do, however, think that all too many Republicans fell into line behind him when we shouldn’t have out of political calculation (calculation which, ultimately, proved incorrect, as that behavior turned out to be unwise politically as well as philosophically).  I also don’t think it correct or fair to call President Obama “a monster”—that’s hysterical hyperbole of the worst sort.

The man’s a politician, nothing more and nothing less—though to be specific, he’s a Chicago politician, which is about the most cynical and manipulative sort our country has—and if there’s “something rotten inside him,” well, there’s something rotten inside each and every one of us.  Traditionally, it’s called sin, though I would imagine that as an atheist, Rall doesn’t think he’s supposed to believe in it.  And yet, it’s there all the same, in Barack Obama no less than in anyone else.

And that, I suspect, is the reason for Rall’s harshness in going after the president:  Barack Obama was supposed to be better, and so far (and here I agree with Rall completely) he’s been worse.  What you hear in this scream of rage is, I think, the anguished fury of severe disillusionment, as it has become apparent that Candidate Obama played the Left the same way he played everyone else.  Such political principles and impulses as he has are hard-left, that much is clear, but (as with Bill Clinton) they are secondary to the main goal of gaining, maintaining, and extending power.  If it suits his particular sort of Realpolitik to keep his promises, then he’ll keep them; if it doesn’t, he won’t; and if he can duck responsibility for not keeping them, or keeping them, or (if most advantageous) for addressing an issue at all, he’ll do that, too.

The political lesson of Ted Rall’s column (apart from its message) is this:  the true believers aren’t going to stand for that very long.  E. J. Dionne, in recognizing (and celebrating!) the fact that President Obama and his administration have been quite deliberately selling different stories to different ideological groups as a tactic for advancing his agenda and isolating conservatives, worried a little that the president might overreach, and that it might not ultimately work:

But establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.

Dionne is correct in his concerns; and given the case of Ted Rall, I suspect that this approach ultimately won’t work, that the president will find that his mastery is ultimately too limited to pull off what he’s attempting.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

—Abraham Lincoln (attributed)