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Barack Obama and the Senate Democrats: already on the rocks?

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So suggests Jennifer Rubin, drawing on a piece in Politico on the Burris fiasco, and she identifies two main causes.  One is the President-Elect’s maladroit handling of the situation; according to Politico, Democrats in the Senate are

complaining that he kept his distance from the Burris controversy then jumped in at the end to claim the mantle of peacemaker—much as he did in the flap over Sen. Joe Lieberman’s support of Republican John McCain’s presidential bid.

As Rubin points out, letting his party’s Senate caucus hang itself without intervening may work fine for a presidential candidate (especially when one’s opponent obligingly jumps into the situation), but it’s a really bad idea once you’re elected president.  Not only will it be necessary for him “to resolve food fights before they spatter him,” but even if they don’t spatter him, the Senate still won’t respond well to being mishandled—particularly if that mishandling results in the Senate looking bad.  If he’s unwilling to spend any of his political capital to help Senate Democrats out, they aren’t likely to play along when he wants them to compromise, or to stick their necks out for him.All of this, however, can be put down to inexperience, and that’s something that can be fixed; as long as President Obama proves a quick enough learner (and he’s certainly bright enough), this shouldn’t be a long-term handicap for his administration.  The other problem Rubin identifies, however, is considerably more serious:

the Senate Democrats don’t much like or respect Reid. Republicans might cackle that the Democrats are just coming around to this realization. Nevertheless, there is a difference between a Senate leader of the opposite party, whose job it is to annoy, frustrate and criticize the White House, and a Senate leader of the same party, whose job it is to build coalitions to pass the President’s agenda and grease the skids for legislation. Reid seems spectacularly ill-suited to fill the latter role. But he’s the chosen leader, and unless more calamities befall the Senate, that’s the position in which Reid will remain. The Senate Democrats’ success (and many of their members’ re-election prospects) will depend as will, to a great extent, the Obama legislative agenda, on the extent of Reid’s finesse. Good luck, fellas.

I have been quite skeptical—some might say, extremely skeptical—about Barack Obama and the kind of president he will prove to be; but the upside to his sketchy record and short political career (which constitute one of my main reasons for skepticism) is that, combined with his impressive natural gifts, there is a substantial possibility that I’ve misread him, and that he’ll prove to be a significantly more effective president than I expected.  (Based on his first round of appointments, he’s certainly bidding fair to be a different president than I expected.)  The same, however, cannot be said of Harry Reid; he’s been doing this long enough that he’s not going to surprise anybody—what you see is what you get.  There may not be any greater problem for the Democrats in 2009-10 than that.Update:  David Broder sees some additional reasons for concern in this affair.

For Bill and Bird: another contender

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that being a band, incidentally, that U2 admired a great deal, that influenced them and was influenced by them in turn:  Big Country.  I’ll grant U2 the lyrical edge (especially for their theological depth), but musically I’d take BC over either U2 or Rush.
Remembrance Day

Song of the South

The Storm

In a Big Country

Look Away

The Seer

Heart of the World

About that honeymoon . . .

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One of the things I heard a lot last year was that electing Barack Obama would make us more popular around the world.  I expressed my skepticism about that, but it was the received wisdom in many quarters, buoyed by international polls.  Now, before he’s even in power, the first returns are in, and I wouldn’t say they’re positive:

The international Left is making it clear:  they won’t be happy just because we have a President who’s half Kenyan.  If he doesn’t give them what they want (Israel on a platter, in this case), they’ll still hate him.

Rod Blagojevich: a template for future scandals?

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Given Barack Obama’s thorough immersion in the Chicago machine, and the number of other simmering issues around Democratic politicians such as Bill Richardson and Charles Rangel, quite possibly.  Of course, since these will be Democratic scandals, the lemming media (aka the Democratic Party PR department) won’t feel the need to shove them down our collective throat as they did with the likes of Mark Foley and Larry Craig; rather, they’ll try to keep these all as quiet as they can and play them down as much as possible.  Democratic scandals are isolated incidents; only Republican scandals reveal a “worrisome pattern of conduct.”  That’s the rule, from the LM’s point of view.  Never mind that the whole Democratic approach to politics is to increase the power of government, which is only going to feed and broaden opportunities for political corruption.  Now, I’m certainly not claiming any kind of moral superiority for the GOP here, merely trying to make the point that one can’t do the same for the Democrats either; if memory serves, the last four presidents have all come in promising a more ethical administration, and while I do think W.’s administration managed a better record that way than his predecessors, that’s not to say they did a good job.  The truth is, whenever money and power are in play, some people are going to bend morally, including a few in truly alarming ways, and some will break off altogether.  The content of your principles will always come in second to the content of your character; if your character is such that you violate your principles, it doesn’t really matter much in the end what those principles were.  That said, I do think the Baseball Crank has a point worth considering about the logical consequences of a big-government philosophy:

Contemporary liberal/progressive ideology stresses, at every turn, that government officials should be given an ever-increasing share of public money to control and disperse, and an ever-increasing role in telling people and businesses how they can use the money and property they are left with. Government officials are, we are to believe, better able to make the ‘right’ decisions about who gets what and how businesses are permitted to operate. . . . In practice, no matter which system is used, it ends up being a short step from believing you have the right and wisdom to direct other people’s property to more deserving recipients and better uses to believing that you are one of the more deserving recipients, and a short trip from telling business how to do its business to telling it who to do business with based on the desire to reward yourself and your friends. The root of money in politics, after all, is politics in money.

In sum, the more you do to increase the amount of money government has to play with, and the degree of power it has over that money, the more you do to provide both opportunity and incentive for corruption.  The apotheosis of this would be the political machine, the entrenched political system based on government money, such as the Democrats in Chicago or Louisiana, or the Republicans in Alaska.  Given that our new president was the political creation of such a machine and has spent his entire political career closely associated with it (and has pulled key staffers from it, including his chief of staff), and given that he and the congressional majority are committed to increasing both the amount of money government has to play with and the degree of power it has over that money, it seems likely that whatever you think of Barack Obama’s personal integrity, there is good reason not to be sanguine about the integrity of his administration.  I suspect that Rod Blagojevich and Bill Richardson will prove to be not isolated incidents, but harbingers of things to come.

Military forces as geopolitical antibodies

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I deplore aggression and violence as a way of solving problems.  They can only lead to worse grievances and problems in the long run.  But being prepared to defend yourself if you have to is not the same thing.  This monstrosity consuming Europe is a cancer of the tissues of civilization.  When the body is infected, it mobilizes its antibodies and destroys that which is alien to it.  So, too, must the planetary organism.  In other words, I accept, regretfully, that there are some evils that can only be stopped by force.  Appealing to their better nature is as futile as attempting to reason with a virus.—”Albert Einstein,” in The Proteus Operation, James P. HoganI don’t offer this quote as an appeal to Einstein’s authority; the book is of course a novel (science-fiction alternate-history, for those not familiar with it), and Hogan put those words in Einstein’s mouth.  He evidently considered them representative of the historical Einstein’s beliefs, but I don’t know enough to judge.  I simply offer it because I think it states the position well, by way of a vivid image.  I would certainly call Hamas, and jihadism more generally, “a cancer of the tissues of civilization” which “can only be stopped by force,” and I think their leaders have quite conclusively proven themselves as remorseless and free of conscience as even the worst virus.

Another global-warming skeptic

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is the distinguished cosmologist and mathematical physicist Frank Tipler, of Tulane University.  His letter of a few weeks ago (which I missed at the time) to blogger William Katz, detailing the agenda-driven work behind this issue and its relationship to government funding of research, and the developing efforts to suppress scientific challenges to global-warming theory (since its supporters can’t disprove them, they must resort to force to silence them), should concern anyone who cares about the state of scientific research in the West.HT:  John Hinderaker

Landing a 747 on the QE2

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That’s about what Barack Obama is trying to do with his sweeping set of legislative proposals to stimulate the economy, as David Brooks recounts.  The problem isn’t content (I think Brooks is right to call this “daring and impressive stuff”); rather,

The problem is overload. . . .  His staff will be searching for the White House restrooms, and they will have to make billion-dollar decisions by the hour. He is asking Congress to behave and submit in a way it never has. He has picked policies that are phenomenally hard to implement, let alone in weeks. The conventional advice for presidents is: focus your energies on a few big things. Obama just blew the doors off that one.Maybe Obama can pull this off, but I have my worries. By this time next year, he’ll either be a great president or a broken one.

We knew the President-Elect is a gambler, but this is something else; to be specific, as Jennifer Rubin says, it’s “hubris squared.”  If he goes ahead with this, I’ll be rooting for him, but . . . well, Congress will be Congress, and I’m not at all sanguine.

Behold the pelican . . .

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People all over the West Coast are, and not in a good way:

Pelicans suffering from a mysterious malady are crashing into cars and boats, wandering along roadways and turning up dead by the hundreds across the West Coast, from southern Oregon to Baja California, Mexico, bird-rescue workers say.Weak, disoriented birds are huddling in people’s yards or being struck by cars. More than 100 have been rescued along the California coast, according to the International Bird Rescue Research Center in San Pedro.Hundreds of birds, disoriented or dead, have been observed across the West Coast.”One pelican actually hit a car in Los Angeles,” said Rebecca Dmytryk of Wildrescue, a bird-rescue operation. “One pelican hit a boat in Monterey.”

The worrisome thing is, we don’t know why; no one has yet come up with an explanation that fits the facts.  Here’s hoping someone does soon, and that it’s something we can address.

Looking back: blogging as a spiritual discipline?

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A year ago today, I put up a post asking whether blogging can be a spiritual discipline (and if so, how), and came to the conclusion that it can.  I tried to start a meme and get others asking that question, but mostly that didn’t happen; my question did prompt a little discussion, but then it fizzled.  Unexpectedly, the main effect of the question I posed was on my own posting habits.  That was my second post of 2008, and the 97th post on this blog; in 2007, I had 65 posts.  By contrast, a year later, this is now my 668th post since that one; it’s fair, I think, to say the change was significant.  Clearly, blogging has become a discipline for me.  The question is, has it been a spiritual discipline?The most obvious answer is, not always.  There have been a lot of posts over this past year for which I couldn’t make that claim, for one reason or another.  That doesn’t necessarily make them bad posts, though some of them might have been; it just means that posting, say, Jonathan Coulton’s mock ’80s sitcom title sequence probably didn’t make me a holier person (though it did make me smile, which is a good thing, too).To some extent, though, I think it has.  I wrote last year that “blogging can help me see the gaps between what I live and what I believe,” and that has proven true, though not exactly in the way I thought.  I do try to “apply my beliefs and their implications not only to the lives of others out there in the culture, but also to myself and my own life”—to ask the question, “If I say x, and that means someone else ought to change and to live differently, how does it mean that I need to change and live differently?”—but I know there are times I manage that and times I don’t; but here’s where the public aspect of blogging comes in handy, because in those times when I don’t, or when I’m careless about doing so, there’s usually someone out there to post a comment and point it out.  As such, one aspect of blogging as a spiritual discipline is that it exposes one to the correction of others.  (Bearing always in mind that no commenter is any more infallible than I am, or than anyone else is, so there is some need to sift and weigh the comments one receives; nevertheless, the conversation is valuable.)As well, I think the simple discipline of writing has helped.  I don’t know that it’s made me a better preacher, but it’s made me a better writer, and has made the process of writing smoother and less wearying for me; as such, it has at least made me better at producing sermons.  That in and of itself, again, might not be a spiritual discipline, except that I think better, and learn better, in conversation than solo; writing might not be quite as good as a good talk with the right person, but writing about God and Scripture and the church can still be quite valuable for my spiritual growth.  I’ve never been very good at the stereotypical “quiet time”; silence is a good discipline for me primarily because it’s a very hard one, and I can’t sit still to save my life—unless I have something to focus me, like writing.  Writing becomes my devotional time, if I’m writing about things which serve that purpose; writing about God sets my mind and my heart on him, and writing about his people shapes and forms me as a pastor.