Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Further commentary on shakedown artist Barack Obama

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As I noted last week, the Obama administration believes it’s the civic duty of some Chrysler investors to lose more money than they should by law and contract so that the unions, who are major investors in the Obama administration, can lose less; when said investors balked at the idea, the president threatened to turn the awesome power of his tame PR flacks (aka the White House press corps, an arm of our “independent media”) loose on them to destroy them.

Megan McArdle summarized the situation this way:

I see a lot of liberal blogs crowing that Obama’s really taking it to the hedge funds who are holding out on the Chrysler bankruptcy. Hedge fund managers, you see, have a civic duty to lose large amounts of other people’s money in order to ensure that the UAW makes as few sacrifices as possible in a bankruptcy.

Predictably, I got a couple liberal commenters popping up saying, in essence, “What’s bad about this?”  Well, let’s start off with McArdle again:

Which brings us to the real question, which is, when did it become the government’s job to intervene in the bankruptcy process to move junior creditors who belong to favored political constituencies to the front of the line? Leave aside the moral point that these people lent money under a given set of rules, and now the government wants to intervene in our extremely well-functioning (and generous) bankruptcy regime solely in order to save a favored Democratic interest group.

No, leave that aside for the nonce, and let’s pretend that the most important thing in the world, far more interesting than stupid concepts like the rule of law, is saving unions. What do you think this is going to do to the supply of credit for industries with powerful unions? My liberal readers who ardently desire a return to the days of potent private unions should ask themselves what might happen to the labor movement in this country if any shop that unionizes suddenly has to pay through the nose for credit. Ask yourself, indeed, what this might do to Chrysler, since this is unlikely to be the last time in the life of the firm that they need credit. Though it may well be the last time they get it, on anything other than usurious terms.

Bill Roberts points out an interesting follow-up from one of her commenters:

Government interference, or arbitrary enforcement of the rule of law is a hallmark of bankruptcies in banana republics, and France. When lenders have confidence that the government will enforce bankruptcy laws (ie the rules of the game) will be consistently upheld, they will lend more freely. When lenders fear their contractual rights will be summarily ignored, they will demand equity-like rates of interest, thus stifling economic activity. Credit is a sacred trust.

The point here is not which party is more “deserving” of more or less of a shrunken pie, lazy unions or heartless hedge funds. Lots of folks fundamentally believe the government should do whatever the hell it wants (eg upend absolute priority in bankruptcy) to effect the “greater good”, as defined by a self-designated minority of people. But all government policies have a cost, and those same folks like to pretend that those costs don’t exist. When the Government flouts the rule of law to fit its preferred special interest groups, that has a real cost.

But then, this isn’t the only area in which we’ve seen banana-republic behavior from this administration starting off . . . I’m hoping this isn’t going to become a theme.  (And if anyone thinks the government’s intervention into the Chrysler bankruptcy is anything other than a payoff to the unions, McArdle also does a nice job of debunking that idea.)  For now, though, it has people in the financial market worried, and the backlash is already showing up.

John Derbyshire of National Review Online passes this one along from “a friend in the hedge fund biz” (HT:  Bill Roberts again):

Hey John—Would you like a sound bite from one of those evil hedge fund guys for Colmes’ show tonight? How’s this: “As a professional investor I’d have to be out of my skull to partner with this government on anything.”

This administration has made it quite clear that they can’t be relied upon to honor contracts or legal precedents and if I can’t know what the rules are before the game starts then I’m not going to play. Hedge funds aren’t like the banks . . . we haven’t failed. We aren’t beholden to the taxpayer to make our way. We have contractual and fiduciary obligation which we will honor. People pay us to make them money not to meet a political goal. So Obama had better think long and hard before he tries to bully us like he did the banks, or try to tell us that “he’s the only thing between us and the pitchforks.”

Also, Geithner and Obama have been saying that they plan on balancing the budget once the crisis is past. The press may believe that twaddle about how he’ll do it by “making things more efficient,” but we in the hedge fund industry aren’t so stupid. We’ve looked at the numbers and know what he’s planning to do. I know dozens of people who are already putting the legal structures in place to move their companies and themselves offshore and away from the grip of the tax man. These are some of the smartest most dynamic people in the world and they’ll have no trouble staying ahead of the [dumb] kids . . . over at the IRS.

So unless Obama wants to run out of “other people’s money” a lot sooner than he expected, he had better keep some people around to pay the bills. And if he keeps demonizing the productive and saying that it’s their responsibility to let him spend their money on the unproductive, then we’ll all be gone. I’ll be working my 14 hour days in Bahrain or Singapore, and Obama can go suck eggs. He needs the productive classes a lot more than the productive classes need him.

The problem here for the kind of approach President Obama is using in this situation is that he really does need the people with the money to cooperate for his plan (or any plan) to work, and strong-arming them into cooperation will only work for a very limited time in a very limited way.  The concern this raises among potential investors is succinctly expressed by Thomas Lauria:

The President is trying to abrogate contractual rights; if he will attack that contractual right, what right will he not attack?

I’ve often thought that the great problem with leftist economic theories is that they implicitly assume that people’s behavior doesn’t change as the incentives change—that reactions remain static, and thus that, for instance, increasing taxes on the rich will mean that the rich will pay more taxes.  This is a problem because the assumption is wildly false; thus, above a certain level, increasing taxes on the rich actually decreases the amount of taxes they pay, because their behavior shifts in ways designed to produce precisely that result.  Wealth protection (through tax avoidance) trumps wealth creation, economic productivity drops accordingly, and the economy suffers, hitting those who aren’t rich enough to make that choice—such as, for instance, the members of the UAW.  The same sort of thing will happen if the investment class decides that the government can’t be trusted to honor contracts if it doesn’t like their outcome:  they simply won’t sign contracts they don’t trust, leaving those who need investors to go whistle for them.

As such, the approach the president is employing here is a lot like the approach he employed in dealing with the Somali pirates last month:  good short-term tactics that will breed distrust and prove counterproductive, perhaps severely so, once his opponents wise up to what he’s likely to do.Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that Chrysler won’t be paying back the $8 billion the feds have given them, and the government won’t be getting stock in return for its “investment,” either.

Instead, the wreckage of Chrysler will be divided up among Fiat, Chrysler’s unions, and Chrysler’s debtholders. Which means that the taxpayers’ $8 billion was just a gift to these three consitituencies.

We don’t know about you, but we can think of a few dozen charities that we’d rather have given that $8 billion to than Chrysler’s debtholders, Chrysler’s unions, and Fiat.

Is the White House going to explain this one, or are we just supposed to ignore it?

On the bright side, at least Barack Obama is making his payments to the labor movement for the nice big white house they helped to buy him . . .

Presidential transparency, brought to you by Coppertone

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I posted a bit on this a couple weeks ago, but given how the “most transparent administration ever” keeps smearing sunblock all over its transparency, further comment seems merited.  Michelle Malkin has a good post up today on the subject, which is particularly notable for this trenchant observation:

From Day One, President Obama has demonstrated a rather self-serving selectivity when it comes to transparency. . . .

Openness in government is fine if it hurts America’s reputation, but not if it harms Obama’s.

She adds, “hostility to transparency is a running thread through Obama’s cabinet,” citing serious issues with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ron Sims, as well as David Axelrod.  The problem, however, starts at the top, with the president’s willingness to go back on his word whenever it suits him:

President Obama set the tone, breaking his transparency pledge with the very first bill he signed into law. On January 29, the White House announced that Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been posted online for review. One problem: Obama had already signed it—in violation of his “sunlight before signing” pledge to post legislation for public comment on the White House website five days before he sealed any deal.

Obama broke the pledge again with the mad rush to pass his trillion-dollar, pork-stuffed stimulus package full of earmarks he denied existed. Jim Harper of the Cato Institute reported in April 2009: “Of the eleven bills President Obama has signed, only six have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. None have been posted for a full five days after presentment from Congress . . .”

Mitt Romney, the Beltway GOP, and the meaning of Evansville

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(Note: this was originally posted at Conservatives4Palin.)

I didn’t blog about it much, but at the beginning of the last presidential campaign, I was intending to vote for Mitt Romney. I wasn’t a huge fan, but my primary concern was finding someone who could beat Rudy Giuliani, the one person in the race I simply could not support; on that score, Gov. Romney seemed like the best option. He was the most conservative of the plausible candidates, and had proven himself to be an effective executive in a number of positions. His record in Massachusetts doesn’t look as good now as it did before I really understood the situation with RomneyCare, but even given that fiasco, the man’s a capable administrator with the guts to make tough decisions. I still think he would have made a better president than John McCain, though Sen. McCain made a better losing nominee since he brought Sarah Palin on the national stage.

That said, since Gov. Romney began his run for the nomination, the only thing he’s done that hasn’t lowered my opinion of him was to suspend his campaign; at every other point, the more I’ve seen of him, the less I’ve thought of him. His recent attempts to diminish Gov. Palin, both directly and by proxy, only compound that; I understand why he’s doing it, but this is one case where to understand most definitely is not to forgive. The fact that he’s denigrating someone who simply doesn’t deserve it is certainly no more acceptable because he’s doing it out of raw ambition, after all.

Gov. Romney’s comments aren’t only ignoble, however, they’re also revealingly clueless. I’m not certain whether he really believes what he’s saying or merely considers it to be a plausible line of attack, but either way, it seems clear that he does not in fact understand Gov. Palin’s influence, which means that he doesn’t understand the reasons for her influence—and in this, I believe he’s representative of the GOP Beltway types who now consider him the rightful heir (or at least a rightful aspirant) to the party’s mantle.

They don’t like her because she’s not one of them, and they fail to understand that that’s whyshe’s influential: that she isn’t one of them is the whole point. She’s one of us, a politician who remains of and for the ordinary barbarians of this country, and at this point, any effort—anyeffort, no matter what else it has going for it—to elevate another Beltway insider as the GOP’s standard bearer is doomed to failure.

All of this, of course, has been said before, here and elsewhere; but there’s a particular aspect to it which I believe is highlighted in a bitterly ironic way by Mitt Romney, of all people, dissing Gov. Palin as just another pretty face. I don’t mean the fact that Gov. Romney himself consciously tried to use his looks to his advantage, and thus was far more deserving of his own jab than Gov. Palin, though the irony there is sharp enough; but there’s something more significant in play here as well, something which is thrown into sharp relief by Gov. Palin’s trip last month to Evansville, IN.

The key thing to understand about that visit is something the executive director of Vandenburgh County RTL said, which Joseph Russo used in his headline: “[Palin] walks the walk and talks the talk. She could . . . be doing other things, but she chose to do this.”

To know just how much that means, you need to know something about the pro-life movement: it has been the beneficiary, from many on the Right, of much talk and very little walk. It’s a grassroots movement outside the elite culture, outside the halls of power, that is primarily used rather than supported by those who have influence. I can’t think how many strong pro-life people I know who looked back at the Bush 43 administration last year and said, in essence, yeah, he gave us Roberts and Alito, but what else did he do for us? Was it worth what we did for him? And the thing is, George W. Bush was no worse in that respect than any other leading conservative politician—he was, in fact, completely typical.

And he wasn’t only typical of politicians, either. I know a pastor who served for many years as the senior pastor of a large, influential Southern Baptist church in one of the cities of the Deep South—a good man, a godly man, and one well familiar with the corridors of power and the wielders of influence in the Southern Baptist Convention. We were talking one time about the whole issue of abortion, and he made a statement that absolutely floored me: he declared that over his whole career, he had never known a Southern Baptist pastor who risked anything for the pro-life movement.

Now, consider that. The SBC is known throughout the country as a conservative Christian denomination, it’s known everywhere for its support of the conservative social agenda, and if you asked a random selection of non-Southern Baptists what they knew about it, I’d bet most of them would mention its opposition to abortion somewhere in there—and yet, according to him, that has all just been words. When the rubber meets the road, effectively, he said, Southern Baptist pastors have been unwilling to walk the talk, unwilling to lay their reputations, the reputations of their congregations, their positions, or anything else on the line to back up what they said they believed. And in that, I don’t say this to bash the SBC, because in my experience, they too are typical.

The point here, let me reiterate, is not to criticize George W. Bush, or my colleagues in the Southern Baptist Church—or me, for that matter; in all honesty, I have to admit that there have been times that I too have ducked away from the issue of abortion instead of taking a stand. I speak here with the rueful honesty of a regretful and repentant sinner; I know I’m no one to cast the first stone. My point, rather, is this: when you see someone willing to put their political capital where their mouth is, willing to lay something on the line and risk something real for the sake of a cause in which they claim to believe, pay attention. Pay attention, because here you have found someone who actually believes something, and does so strongly enough to live it out when it matters.

This, to come at last to the promise of my title, is the meaning of Evansville—and make no mistake, it’s a meaning that the organizers of those events understand perfectly. They have no doubt seen plenty of Republican types show up for the photo op and then be long gone when it mattered; for Gov. Palin to come and speak, especially at a time when she (and everyone else who was paying attention) had to know she was going to get hammered by the ankle-biters back in Alaska—to make an effort that actually cost her something in order to support a cause she believes in—clearly meant the world to them. That she refused the offer of a fundraiser as part of the deal (which I suspect she would have seen as cheapening her visit, and quite frankly would have cheapened it) only made her visit all the more meaningful.

The thing is, those folks in Vandenburgh County were absolutely right to feel that way, and to see Gov. Palin that way, because with that trip she did something that politicians rarely do: she gave of herself for the sake of others. She showed by her actions that her political positions aren’t just political positions, they’re things that she believes deeply enough and strongly enough that she’s willing to spend her own political capital and put herself on the line for their sake, and for the sake of the people involved. She showed that she was willing to make that effort and take the criticism and the sniping from the peanut gallery for the sake of people trying to save the lives of unborn children in southern Indiana, and for the sake of Down Syndrome children like her own youngest son. She showed that what she believes isn’t a matter of political convenience, nor is it subject to renegotiation for the sake of political advantage, because it’s rooted in who she is and what she cares about and what drives her to do what she does.

And in that, she separated herself—decisively—from Mitt Romney, the GOP establishment as a whole (though not all its members; it was also heartening to see Michael Steele there, and one may hope that this is a sign of things to come), the conservative chattering classes, and many of the party’s presidential hopefuls. And in that, she showed clearly the roots of her influence, and the reason why that influence will not wane unless she decides to lay it aside. To borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln on U. S. Grant which others have borrowed recently, we’ve decided that we can’t spare this woman—she fights. If the Beltway GOP wants to win our support, let them stop trying to tear her down, and go and do likewise.

Jack Kemp, RIP

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It’s not typical for a politician’s death to get coverage on ESPN—but then, Jack Kemp wasn’t exactly your typical politician.  To be sure, he wasn’t the only high-profile athlete to go into politics—the U.S. Senate has even seen two Hall of Famers among its members in recent decades, Bill Bradley and Jim Bunning, though both are marginal inductees, and the House of Representatives currently has former NFL QB (and first-round bust) Heath Shuler serving from North Carolina—but successful athletes who become major political figures are rare, and Kemp was both.  He had a rough ride establishing himself in the pros, but when the AFL came along he seized the opportunity with both hands, quarterbacking Buffalo to four playoff appearances and two league championships (and losing another with San Diego in 1961) and making seven AFL All-Star teams.

He then parlayed his fame in Buffalo into nine terms in the House from upstate New York, during which time he established himself as one of this country’s most intelligent, articulate, and vocal exponents of conservative political principles.  I’m sure I’m far from the only one who thinks that the GOP and the nation both would be a lot better off had Kemp won his 1988 bid for the Republican presidential nomination rather than losing to the name recognition of George H. W. Bush, the incumbent VP.  Still, he continued to contribute as President Bush 41’s HUD secretary, then served as Bob Dole’s VP nominee in 1996, bringing energy and conservative enthusiasm to the GOP ticket much as Sarah Palin would for Sen. Dole’s fellow war veteran and centrist Republican John McCain twelve years later.

As a childhood fan of Kemp’s Bills and a neighbor of his in Maryland who writes extensively on both politics and football, Gregg Easterbrook is uniquely positioned to write about Jack Kemp, and his eulogy on ESPN.com is well worth reading because it captures a sense of the broad sweep of the man’s life.  As he notes, and as David Goldman (aka Spengler) points out in his piece on the First Things website, without Kemp it would be hard to imagine the Reagan Revolution happening the way it did.

Former vice-presidential candidate, congressman, and Housing secretary, he was the most improbable and the most important hero of the Reagan Revolution after the Gipper himself. Without Jack’s true-believer’s passion for tax cuts as a remedy for the stagflation of the 1970s, Reagan would not have staked his presidency on an untested and controversial theory. His death should remind us how lucky we were to have leaders like Reagan and Kemp, and a political system that allowed improbable leaders—an ex-actor and a retired quarterback—to appear at providential moments.

It was impossible to be cynical in Jack’s vicinity. He radiated sincerity and optimism. Corny as it sounds, Jack was the real thing, an all-American true believer in this country and in the capacity of its people to overcome any obstacle once given the chance. . . .

What attracted Jack Kemp to supply-side economics was the promise of advancement for ordinary people. . . . He passionately believed in individual opportunity and free markets, and he needed an argument to take to the union rank-and-file who made up the bulk of his district’s voters. Supply-side economics, the premise that tax cuts and corresponding regulatory reform would unleash the creative energies of Americans, persuaded him, and he became its great missionary.

A genuinely independent thinker, Kemp was that rarest of all birds:  an unpredictable politician.  Easterbrook captures this when he writes,

Kemp was keenly concerned with the plight of the poor. The libertarian side of his personality viewed tolerance as crucial. Kemp often broke with other Reagan supporters on women’s and minority issues, respect for labor and an end of discrimination against homosexuality; and though a devout Christian himself—prayer circles are a regular event at his home—he was disgusted by all forms of religion-based bias. His signature issue became Enterprise Zones. Kemp was dismayed by the decline of mostly minority inner cities, and hardly just Buffalo. He felt excessive regulations and legal liability discouraged businesses from investing in urban areas where jobs were needed, while in effect encouraging business to develop unplowed land that ought to be preserved. . . .

When Bush was elected to the White House, he named Kemp Secretary of HUD, a position from which he implemented Enterprise Zone ideas. HUD is an agency that traditionally has not interested conservatives much, because it deals with issues of the impoverished, such as public housing. Kemp dove into HUD’s subject matter with zeal, and over time was proven correct, as the Enterprise Zone was a factor—hardly the only factor, of course—in the spectacular American urban comeback that began in the 1990s. . . .

Beneath the surface of Kemp’s political heterodoxy was a lifelong love of argument over ideas. Kemp clung to many causes viewed as idiosyncratic, such as a return to the gold standard, and advanced “supply side” economic ideas that were in some ways more radical than anything coming from the left. He spent far more time with writers and intellectuals than do most nationally known politicians, and he got more excited about books than about polls. While many politicians want to shake hands with intellectuals at photo ops, Kemp wanted to argue, sometimes well into the night. . . . Unlike so many politicians, who leave behind little but backroom deals and self-congratulation, Kemp’s legacy is one of ideas. As of last autumn, Kemp was still banging out newspaper columns in support of John McCain and in opposition to taxes. Unlike so many political figures who only preach family values, Kemp was married for more than 50 years to his college sweetheart, Joanne Main. . . .

Kemp had read some of my books—he seemed to have read at least parts of every book—and took me aside a few times to talk public policy. It was pleasant, and I wish it had lasted longer. I couldn’t convince Kemp that Obama is not a socialist; to win an argument with him, you would have needed to bring along an army. But I also don’t think he really meant to insult the new president. I think he admired the new president quite a bit. He just liked to provoke political arguments and see where they led. For him, they led to a great life well lived.

Easterbrook ends with a testimony to Kemp’s character; Goldman echoes the theme.

Jack was a leader who loved his country and put it before personal gain. When he left office he had the equity in his house and not much else. But he had four children, including two sons who played professional football, and seventeen grandchildren. . . .

A devout Christian, Jack made far more of a difference than an ex-quarterback with a physical education degree from Occidental College had a right to. He earned our gratitude not only for what he accomplished, but for what he proved about the character of the United States.

A good man, a godly man, a politician who brought his country great benefit—and a mighty fine quarterback to boot:  Jack Kemp was a great American, and this nation is poorer for his death.  Requiescat in pace.

1000

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This is my 1000th post.  I haven’t noted previous milestones, but 1000 is just such a resonant round number, I couldn’t let it pass unremarked.  Considering that from October 2003 through December 2006 I only posted 30 times, no one would have been likely to predict I’d hit this one (not that anyone would have cared enough to consider the question); 2007 was a busier year, but even then I only put up 65 posts.  In January of last year, though, I was inspired to take blogging seriously as a discipline, and that changed things; in the 16 months from my first post that year until now, I’ve put up 905 pieces, or about 56 per month.  Of course, a lot of those have been minor—video posts, song lyrics, quotes—but there’s been a fair bit of serious material, too; this blog is still small potatoes as these things go (actually, fingerlings would be more to the point), but there are folks who read on some kind of regular basis, too, and I appreciate all of you.

I was ruminating a bit the other day over some of the hits and misses I’ve had, and my mind got stuck a little on my 2006 post on Barack Obama, in which I praised his speech on religion in the public square.  That was the point at which he really stuck in my mind as a likely presidential candidate, though I didn’t think he’d be ready for the office in 2008 (and 100 days into his administration, I still don’t).  In retrospect, I think I gave him more credit for that speech than he had coming, but if I heard more what I wanted to hear than what he was actually committed to, I don’t blame myself too much for that, since he has a gift for eliciting that sort of response.  Given how many pro-life evangelicals managed to convince themselves that he deserved their support, I think I did a pretty decent job of staying objective; I suspect the biggest fallout for the pro-life cause from the Obama presidency will be the number of evangelicals who, when they really face the cognitive dissonance between their convictions and their vote, sacrifice the former to justify the latter to themselves and others, and end up coming out in support of abortion.  I hope there won’t be too many, but I don’t think they’ll be isolated cases, either.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the ride, and whether it does anyone else any good or not, I think this blog is helping me grow as a thinker and writer, and I even think it’s helped my preaching; and I do hope it provides some benefit to those of you who are regular visitors, and to the various folks who drop by for one thing and another.  Onward and upward.

Not What You Expect

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(Isaiah 55:6-13; John 3:5-17)

John Piper made the point early in his plenary message at GCNC that there’s a difference between the main point of a text and the most important point in that text, and that we need to be careful to keep them straight.  That’s an important thing to keep in mind in reading this passage from Isaiah, because the prophet here makes several very, very large points and draws on some huge and important truths, but he does so in the service of one very clear main point:  the call to his hearers to seek the Lord.

Seek the Lord. This is the point to which Isaiah has been building across fifteen-plus chapters, and the message he’s been trying to get across all along the way. In the beginning of this chapter, God issues the invitation, first in metaphorical terms—“Come, all who are thirsty”—and then in more direct language: “Incline your ear and come to me; hear me, so that your soul may live.” God is inviting his people to be his people in earnest; all that remains is for them to answer the invitation, and so Isaiah lays out the imperative as bluntly as it’s possible to do: seek the Lord, call on his name.

There are a few important things to note about this. First, there’s a time limit—the offer won’t be good forever, and the expiration date isn’t specified. Indeed, it can’t be, because whenever the final expiration might be, the offer is guaranteed to expire for each individual person at their death—and none of us knows when that will be. The point Isaiah is trying to make here is that this isn’t only a critically important invitation to answer, it’s also an urgent one, because none of us knows how long it will last; the future isn’t guaranteed, as death could come at any time, for anyone. Isaiah tells anyone who will listen that the only time to respond to God’s invitation, the only time to seek his face, is now, while he has your attention, while you’re thinking of it; after all, you won’t respond while you’re not thinking of it, and you can never be sure that you’ll get another chance. Seek the Lord while he may be found, before it’s too late.

Second, the offer is open now, for everyone; there is no one alive for whom it’s already too late, regardless of what they may have done. I was thinking about this at the conference, talking with a woman I ran into at one of the publishers’ tables. This woman was looking for materials to help her minister to a friend who was in the throes of despair, convinced that she had fallen so far from God that she was beyond hope—that she was so bad that God no longer wanted to save her. She believed that for her, the invitation had been withdrawn; she understood the reality and weight of her sin, but not the reality and power of God’s grace. Granted, that’s not an easy balance to keep, especially since the Devil’s always trying to knock us off one way or the other—which way doesn’t really matter, but if we get to the point where we see our sin and God’s grace as they really are, he loses. Yes, we should take our sin seriously, no question—God certainly does—but that’s why he sent his Servant, to deal with it. Now is the acceptable time; now is the year of the Lord’s favor.

Three, this invitation isn’t about being good enough. God doesn’t say, “Come, all of you who’re doing great and have everything you need, and I’ll give you even more,” he says, “Come, all who are thirsty.” Come, you whose lives are a mess, you who are struggling, you who don’t have it all together, you who aren’t even sure where all of it is. The call of God isn’t to those who think they’re doing just fine, it’s to those who know they need him; as Jesus said, it’s the sick who need a doctor, and he came for those who know they’re sick. That’s one reason we confess our sins together every Sunday, to prod ourselves into admitting—to God, to each other, but most basically to ourselves—that yes, we do still have sin and darkness in our hearts, and yes, we do still need the gospel, because we still aren’t good enough on our own. It’s to help us remember, week after week, that we still live only by God’s grace, and that we still need that grace—that we still need God—because for most of us, that’s something the Devil is always trying to make us forget.

What we need to remember is that this invitation, the invitation to seek the Lord, is an invitation to change. To seek the Lord isn’t just to learn things about him or to make sure he’s actually there, but to focus our lives on him, to seek to live every moment in his presence, before his face; and to do that, we need to turn from our thoughts and our ways. God calls us to come to him just as we are, because he loves us just as we are—but he loves us too much to let us stay this way, and so seeking him means opening ourselves up for him to transform us from the inside out. He will show us mercy, and he will pardon us freely, because of what his Servant has done for us—but we need to accept that, to accept that we need his mercy.

This is true for everyone, even the best of us. Notice that combination of “thoughts” and “ways,” because both are important. There are a lot of folks who think they’re doing just fine, because they’re doing all the right things—well, most of the right things, anyway—but they’re doing them for a lot of the wrong reasons, and their thoughts and beliefs aren’t right before God; outwardly, their lives look good, but the inside doesn’t match up. At the same time, we’ve all known people who can say all the right things about God, but the way they live doesn’t match. As James tells us, faith in God that doesn’t produce a life like God’s life is no true faith at all; but at the same time, as Hebrews says, it’s impossible to live such a life that pleases God except by faith. As Asbury’s John Oswalt puts it, “Sin is ultimately a matter of attitude. However superficially ‘righteous’ a person may be, if one persists in imagining that one can live independently from God, then that person is profoundly unrighteous.”

The bottom line is that God wants us to turn aside from our own thoughts and our own ways to seek his thoughts and his ways—no exceptions, no excuses, no ifs, ands, or buts—because his thoughts and ways are better, because he has something better to offer us. We tend to resist this because we’ve learned to want what the world trains us to want and expect what it teaches us to expect, but God doesn’t restrict himself to fulfilling our expectations; he’s on about something far bigger and far grander and far more wonderful than that. I don’t think anyone’s ever captured this better than C. S. Lewis in his essay “The Weight of Glory”—in my book, the best thing he ever produced—when he wrote,

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The gap between us and God—in holiness, in wisdom, in goodness, in understanding, in love, in knowledge, in faithfulness, in power, in joy, in everything—is beyond our ability to imagine, let alone cross; we can’t even fully conceive of how much greater God is than we are, or how much more good he is, or how much more he sees and knows and understands.  That’s why God says through Isaiah, “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”—a statement which means even more to us than it did to his first hearers, because we know that much more about just how far up the heavens go.  We can’t even measure how far above us God is, and how great the gap is between us and him.  But the thing is, we don’t have to, because we don’t have to cross that gap; God took care of that for us. We just have to trust him that if we will forsake our own ways and our own thoughts, he’ll teach us something better, and give us blessings that surpass anything we could come up with on our own.

Now, this doesn’t come naturally. Giving up our own thoughts and our own ways, giving them over to God and letting him change us, is hard—we have to fight ourselves to do it; and God’s blessings on our lives have a way of including things like suffering that don’t really feel like blessings. He answers our prayers, but often not according to our expectations, in the ways that we would plan out if we had the chance. He just asks us to trust him that he is at work for what is best for us—that he knows what that is and has the ability to bring it about—in the midst of our broken, fallen world; and he promises us that we have good reason to trust him, for he never fails to do what he says he will do; he never fails to accomplish his purposes. God speaks his word—such as the call to repent and to seek him, and the promise that if we do so, we will find in him the true life that this world cannot offer—and his word carries with it his power to effectively and unfailingly bring about what he has promised.

Thus, Isaiah says, surely all creation will burst forth in praise at the Lord’s redemptive work; the extravagant imagery here makes it clear that he’s moved far beyond talking about the return from Babylon to Jerusalem, and is envisioning God gathering his people home from their spiritual exile. We do not yet see the creation rejoice in this way, because the time has not yet come for it to experience its own redemption—that will not come until the end of times when all the world is made new; this promise waits to be fulfilled with the completion of God’s redemptive work in us, when his kingdom comes at last in the fullness of his power, and all things are finally made right. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord and their vindication from me, declares our God.

Barack Obama, union enforcer

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Mariner fans once dubbed Seattle Times beat writer Bob Finnegan “Pocket Lint” because he was so deep in ownership’s pocket—his pieces were, dependably, dutiful recitations of whatever the company line happened to be—and now I’m starting to think the nickname may need to be revived for Barack Obama.  We knew the labor movement had him in its pocket, but the whole business with Chrysler is beyond anything I would have expected.  President Obama and his administration essentially took a crowbar and attempted to kneecap a group of Chrysler investors in an effort to win better terms for the United Auto Workers than the UAW will be able to get in bankruptcy proceedings now that the automaker has filed for Chapter 11.  As the ever-invaluable Beldar lays it out,

What the Obama Administration has been trying to do, however, has been to cajole or—it’s now becoming more clear—threaten people who carefully bargained for less risk, and who thereby had to settle for lower rewards all along, into voluntarily forfeiting the protections they bought and paid for in the event of the underlying business’ insolvency. Primarily through Chrysler’s pension and retiree health-care obligations, the UAW is a creditor of Chrysler, but one whose position is less favored by the bankruptcy laws than the investors (debt holders) represented by companies like Oppenheimer Funds or Perella Weinburg. Unlike the UAW, their clients negotiated, bought, and paid for the rights not to have to have to make the same “sacrifices” that equity holders or general unsecured creditors would be compelled to make under the bankruptcy laws. But Obama insists—on pain of presidential demonization and worse—that these so-called “corporate renegades” (who’ve been guilty of nothing other than greater prudence) make those sacrifices anyway, and that they do so specifically in order to benefit the UAW!

This goes beyond populism or pro-unionism. Barack Obama is engaged in an assault on not just the entire system of business in the free world, but on the American rule of law upon which it is founded.

And the crowbar in question?  The White House press corps, as the lawyer for one of those investors told a talk-radio host in Detroit:

One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House Press Corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.

Not that we really needed any further evidence that the MSM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party machine, but that’s still telling.  The White House, of course, is denying the story; as for the response from the aforementioned reporters?  Aside from Jake Tapper, crickets.

The bottom line here, in Beldar’s words, is that

the Obama administration is engaged in a colossal abuse of power whose magnitude far exceeds a mere subversion of the White House press corps. Barack Obama has become Guido, the thug who everyone knows has not only a nasty habit but a nasty taste for breaking kneecaps. And the beneficiary of his shakedowns are the United Auto Workers.

Regardless of your position on Chrysler, unions, or any of the other parties involved in this mess, that sort of thing isn’t good for anybody for very long.  The rules need to be the same for everyone, and the same at every point in the process.  When the government starts bending them to try to manipulate results—when the process is compromised for the sake of someone’s agenda—the system will adjust in a way that will only hurt our economy, and especially those who are most vulnerable.

The thing is, these folks invested a lot of money in an effort to help Chrysler rebound—yes, in the hopes that they would profit off that rebound; our economy doesn’t run on altruism—and they did so knowing what the rules were if their efforts succeeded and what they were if Chrysler went down anyway.  Let them and others like them get the idea that the government is willing and able to do whatever is necessary to change those rules after the fact in order to skew the results to its liking, and the next time a big company is looking for help (General Motors, anyone?  The New York Times?), the money won’t be there.

Investors are willing to take the normal risks of business, because those risks are predictable, and they’re taken into account in the terms of the contract.  If they perceive a significant risk of ex post facto government intervention on behalf of other parties—risks which are neither predictable nor quantifiable—they’ll sit on their hands, rather than take the chance that the next kneecap the Obama administration aims at will be theirs; and GM, or whichever company totters next, will go down.

For those frightened by the Mexican flu outbreak

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here are some words of wisdom that should allay your concern.  This comes from my uncle, a longtime specialist in infectious diseases who’s seen a lot of things come and go over the years; he knows what he’s talking about.

To family, friends and others:

Because of the widespread disinformation being perpetrated by the MSM, I feel obliged to share with my family and friends an accurate perception of the current H1N1 influenza outbreak. As many of you know, I am an acknowledged infectious disease specialist. What many do not know is that I have served as a subject-matter expert to both CDC and WHO over the years, and have an accurate assessment of their politics and capabilities. Therefore, I can presume to offer some opinions on this problem.

Seriously, it is somewhat of a problem, but mainly in perception. The MSM has blown it all out of proportion, showing street scenes of people wearing masks, etc, etc. This morning the Today show was all a-gog about “the first US death”, which wasn’t. It was a Mexican kid who was a few yards over the border in Brownsville, and got taken to Houston (where he exposed dozens of other people). But it was a Mexican case, not a US case.

All the US cases have been mild. The NYC outbreak is directly traceable to Mexico; a bunch of seniors had just returned from spring break in Mexico. The fact that the strain in NYC came from Mexico, but the cases are not so severe suggests that it is the Mexican health care system (or lack of same) that is contributing to the high fatality rates there (CDC acknowledged the same idea late today). It’s possible that the deaths are due to bacterial superinfection, similar to what happened in 1918. There is some suggestion that “cytokine storm” might be responsible, but, if that is so, why are Mexican immune systems reacting differently that US immune systems?

The acting head of CDC said on TV today that there is no vaccine against H1N1 influenza, which is only partially true. There have been many mixes of flu vaccine over the years which have contained H1N1 strains, just not this PARTICULAR one. Anyone who has had the flu vaccine regularly over the years should have at least partial protection, which might explain the difference between the US and Mexico.

The CDC on-line recommendations are reasonable and non-panicky. Its the media that is the problem. AND whoever the idiot was at WHO who pushed the “global pandemic” panic button. This is nowhere near a pandemic. It probably won’t ever turn into a pandemic. I think the folks at WHO are covering their sixes because of the SARS outbreak a few years ago (which wasn’t a pandemic, either, just a global episode.)

Apparently the bloggers are running wild, too. Some are saying this is a Chinese or Russian biowarfare plot (patent BS!). Others are saying it is a Federal scheme, and to avoid getting the vaccine at all costs (again, BS, but related to the 1970s swine flu immunization fiasco.)

What to do? Don’t panic. Obama has it all under control. His brilliant suggestion today that if a school has one case of swine flu, they shut down for the week is real stupidity. By the time a case is DOCUMENTED as H1N1, the exposure will have already been done. What he should do is close the border with Mexico for a week. The Cubans, and others, have already shut down all flights to and from Mexico.

A modicum of caution; avoiding crowds and enclosed, crowded places when possible; eating well and keeping a sense of proportion are the best means of prevention.

“This, too, shall pass”. We survived the 1918 pandemic; we survived SARS; we will survive this episode.

William O. Harrison, MD, FACP, FACPM, FIDSA
CAPT(MC)USN(ret)

Money and writing

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Sir, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

—Samuel Johnson

Always pleasant to be labeled a blockhead by a genius.  Still, fortunately for me, there are many other writers who disagree with Dr. Johnson.  There are also many who note, essentially, that if Dr. Johnson were correct, no one but a blockhead would ever write.  Fortunately for all of us, this doesn’t prove to be the case . . .

“Heresy” is a big word

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That was one of Mark Driscoll’s observations during his message at GCNC last week: “heresy” is a big word, a loaded word, that should only be used carefully, when necessary.  That’s not to say that we should never use it—sometimes it’s necessary, when people are claiming the name of Jesus to teach things that are significantly at odds with the gospel—but we must be very sure of our ground before we use that word, and equally sure of the spirit in which we use it.  That must never be an accusation hurled in anger, but must only be spoken gently, in a gracious spirit of loving correction.

S. M. Hutchens addresses this in an editorial in the latest issue of Touchstone called “The War on Error: The Business of Confronting Heresy”; it is in general a careful and thoughtful piece that takes note both of the need to name heresy for what it is and of the dangers in doing so overaggressively.

If an accusation is made, it must be made clearly, forcefully, and memorably, so that it is understood by those one is trying to protect from false doctrine: “This is untrue; it is heresy; avoid these people who teach it.”

This must be done judiciously and in the line of duty. If I have any quarrel with certain fathers, it is not that they identified false teaching for what it was, but that they sometimes did it so frequently that it may have become difficult to hear. There is besides a certain pathological temperament that enjoys hunting down and denouncing error and subjecting those who commit it to terror and humiliation that hardens them against truth. The heresy-hunting inquisitor is not a divine office, whereas pastor and teacher are. To the former mentality, exposing error is not a painful task cast in one’s path by the duties of office, but a form of pleasure—a dungeoner’s pleasure of which no good man would be proud.

However, I think there’s a point, named in the editorial, where Hutchens himself goes over the line.  Heretical doctrine is not merely doctrine which is in error, but doctrine which is in error on the core matters of the Christian faith, in such a way that the doctrine fundamentally threatens the integrity of the gospel message; it’s a significant departure from what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” nothing else, and nothing less.  Only those things which lead people away from the very means of salvation, then, deserve this label.  As such, I cannot agree when Hutchens writes,

These considerations have weighed heavily on me because of my concern with egalitarianism, which I have identified as a heresy. Although the identification was not difficult from a theological point of view—and our opponents are now in many places returning the compliment, accusing us of subordinationism: but surely one of us is heretical—its publication was very difficult indeed.

This is not just a matter of my being an egalitarian, though I will confess that being labeled a heretic is mildly irritating; it’s a matter of Hutchens using a word that’s far too big for the subject.  Is egalitarianism wrong?  Perhaps, though I don’t believe so; we can debate it.  But when he says “surely one of us is heretical,” he puts that out of possibility:  he says that those with whom he disagrees are not merely wrong, but grievously wrong, to such an extent that it threatens our salvation—and thus that if he were in fact wrong, the same would be true of him.

This is where I think Hutchens is seriously wrong.  I don’t see any support for his conclusion, and I don’t believe he can support it; scripturally, there is clearly an argument for his complementarian position, but not for the case that that position is essential for salvation.  Indeed, at this point it seems to me that he’s guilty of what Ray Ortlund dubbed “Galatian sociology”:  he’s added belief in something extrinsic to the gospel to belief in Jesus.  He may well be correct that belief in Jesus ought to lead to his position on male/female roles and relations, but that in and of itself is not enough to justify his conclusion that any other position is heretical.

If anything, in asserting that one must believe in Jesus and in complementarianism, he’s made himself vulnerable to a charge of heresy on the grounds that he has made salvation dependent not on Jesus but on right doctrine.  This is what the late Stan Grenz (if I recall correctly) called “the evangelical heresy,” that of putting our faith not in Jesus but in our creeds.  This is not to say that creeds don’t matter and right doctrine doesn’t matter, because the truth of what we believe matters immensely; but it is to say that it’s even more important to put the locus of salvation in the right place, not in the truth of what we believe, but in the truth of the one in whom we believe—or perhaps we might say, in the Truth in whom we believe.  The truth of our beliefs is important, because where we get things wrong, it obscures and distorts our understanding of the one in whom we put our faith—but it’s still he and he alone who saves us, not the correctness of our understanding of him.

As such, I believe Hutchens has shown himself guilty of a grave error in pronouncing gender egalitarians guilty of heresy, because he has elevated a particular belief about how God wants us to order our lives to a position of equality with belief in God himself; this is, I believe, a displacement of the proper centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ for salvation, and that is a serious matter indeed.  I hesitate to declare that his error rises to the level of imperiling his eternal soul; as I said at the beginning, heresy is a very big word indeed, and I don’t consider that I have the right to make that judgment.  But I think that Hutchens would do very well to reconsider, if not his complementarian view of gender, at least the theological absolutism with which he holds that position, and whether he’s really in line with the gospel of Jesus Christ to declare all countervailing positions not merely wrong but fully heretical.  That way, it seems to me, lies nothing good.