Category Archives: Politics

Sign of the times

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Though I knew I wasn’t going to like the outcome, I’ve still been looking forward to having this election over with. I’ve especially been looking forward to the cessation of political ads, but I’ve been almost as glad at the thought of no more yard signs. Unfortunately, those haven’t disappeared; actually, it’s amazing how many are still up. And then, driving home from work yesterday, I saw that a new one had joined the others:

(My apologies for my shadow in the corner; I took this shot this morning, since I wanted to be sure I got the pictures before someone takes this sign down, and the lighting conditions were far from optimal.) I saw that yesterday, and I just about drove off the road, I was so surprised. But then, heading back the other way for Wednesday night stuff at the church, I saw the other side (again, my apologies for the lighting):

Now, I’m not posting these photos because I endorse their sentiment. Far from it, actually—this is the equal and opposite error to Joe Biden suggesting the DoJ should put Bush and Cheney on trial, and I have no use for the criminalization of politics, in any direction. Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid have done this country no good, I believe, but they haven’t done anything to merit impeachment (as far as is publicly known, anyway), and Barack Obama hasn’t done anything at all. (I suppose if you wanted to criminalize doing nothing in the U.S. Senate, you’d have a case, but then you’d have to indict about half the body, which wouldn’t be an improvement.)Rather, I’m posting these photos because this sign worries me. Not a lot—it is, after all, just one isolated sign in one town in northern Indiana—but as with letters to the editor, you have to figure that one person doing something like this probably speaks for a number of other folks who feel the same way; and I don’t know how many people that is, how widely held this attitude might be, or—the real concern—how it might spread if things start getting rough too soon for the new administration. This isn’t a fire conservatives should start playing with. We’ve put up with enough of this garbage directed at the Bush 43 administration, and we knew it was wrong then—we should remember it’s wrong and not be tempted to start pelting the Obama/Pelosi administration with it. Policy disagreement is a political matter, not a criminal matter, and we need to keep it that way.

One observation

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I know there are plenty of folks proclaiming a political realignment, that America is no longer a center-right nation; but I don’t believe it, for three reasons. One, I believe there’s little evidence that this election was a repudiation of conservative principles, given that the Republican Party isn’t particularly identified with conservative principles at the moment and was running a nominee who himself isn’t seen as all that conservative. (IMHO, John McCain is a lot more conservative than he’s given credit for, but he’s certainly more to the center than a true conservative standard-bearer would be.) Rather, this was the culmination of a popular repudiation of the Republican Party of the last eight years; if, from the ashes of 2006 and 2008, a new GOP arises, true to its conservative roots, led by Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty and Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy, after a period in which they are clearly not responsible for anything the federal government does, I think we’ll see a very different response from the national electorate. The root here isn’t popular disgust with conservatism, but rather popular disgust with D.C.—and the Democrats now have that all to themselves.Two, even given that, Barack Obama could only pull 52% of the vote; running to succeed the least-popular outgoing incumbent since Harry Truman, he only pulled 4 million more votes than John Kerry did four years ago, and one million more than George W. Bush did. A shift, yes, and certainly one which produced a major change in the Electoral College—but not really all that impressive a shift, given the electorate’s weariness of the Bush-era GOP. This victory gives the Democrats the opportunity to create a political realignment, either honestly or crookedly, but it does not in and of itself represent one.And three, the results of major ballot measures around the country don’t bear out the image of a country suddenly gone liberal. What they suggest, rather, is a country that’s shifted a little to the left because of disaffection with the theoretically conservative party, but by and large still thinks about the way it’s always thought.

Time for prayer

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The election is over, and I have no trouble in affirming that the candidates who won are those whom God ordained to their positions, and that God so ordained them for his purposes. I do not, however, believe that those purposes are for what most people would conceive as our blessing as a nation; I do affirm that times of trial and judgment are part of God’s blessing, but that’s hard to see when we’re in them. I feel, at this moment, rather like the prophet Habakkuk: I don’t like what I see coming, but I believe that God is sovereign in it, and I am committed to prayer and praise.Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.
The Sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to tread on the heights.—Habakkuk 3:17-19 (TNIV)Therefore, I will be praying for those who will be hurt by the resurgence of the abortion holocaust in this nation. Theologically, I don’t believe in praying for the dead, and in any case I trust in the grace and the love of God for those who will die unborn as a result of the policies of the incoming Democratic government; but I will be praying for the mothers who will bear the guilt, felt or unfelt, of planning and consenting to the deaths of their unborn children, and for those who bear the active responsibility for killing them. I will be praying as well for those whom God has called to particular roles in resisting this holocaust, both that they will stand firm and that they will find ways to do so which will communicate the grace and the love of God and the caring support of his church to those considering abortion, rather than merely warnings of judgment.I will be praying for the media of this country, reporters and editors alike, that they will report on the Democratic administration with the diligence and honesty which they did not show in reporting on the Obama campaign. I’m tempted to pray that they will remember their adversarial role with respect to the incoming administration and pursue it with as much vigor and determination as they did with respect to the Bush 43 administration, but that would be vindictive of me; as it is, I will pray that they will have the intellectual and moral courage never to quash a story for ideological or financial reasons, but that if a story deserves to be reported—in God’s eyes, not necessarily in mine—that they will report it, no matter how much it hurts their own political agendas. I’ll be praying for this for their own sake as much as anything, since if they don’t, they’ll regret it in the long run.I will be praying for the Republican opposition, that they will learn (and learn the right lessons!) from this; I will be praying that they repent of their surrender to business as usual and their accommodation to power and money and the corruption that come with them, and return to a principled conservatism. After all, for at least the next two years, they will be irrelevant regardless; they might as well use the freedom that comes with irrelevance to reclaim the conservative agenda (and, one hopes, find ways to convince people that they actually mean to stick to it this time).And, neither last nor by any means least, I will be praying for Barack Obama, who has won what may well turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. He has won the highest prize of all by putting himself in hock to his party’s machine and creating incredibly high expectations among a majority of the American electorate; he simply cannot keep all the promises he has made, and the ones he can keep—and indeed, will have to keep, will he or nil he, to the party machine—will only accelerate and worsen his breaking of the rest. Disillusionment is inevitable with any politician, and particularly with any new president, but he’s set himself up for a particularly severe response, when it turns out that his election does not in fact mean that “the oceans stop their rise, and the planet begins to heal”; for Barack Obama, there is nowhere left to go but down.This means that he needs the grace of God in an extraordinary way in order to succeed, and I will be praying for him that he will receive that extraordinary grace. I will pray that he will govern with the wisdom of Solomon and the integrity of Nehemiah, and that he will seek the righteousness and justice of God ahead of the best interest of his party or his own political future. In a sense, he too has won a peculiar freedom: the freedom of having no higher aspiration left to him. If he claims and uses it, rather than becoming the slave of his desire for re-election, he might be able to break free of the chains his party believes it has on him, and actually become, to some degree, the figure of change he claimed to be in his campaign. I will pray this for him. I will pray for him that God will give him wisdom, courage, and resolve in dealing with the enemies of the nation he has been called to serve, that he would do so in ways that will be for the blessing of this country and the world, and that he would stick to his guns and not back down in the face of opposition. And most of all, I will pray that the Holy Spirit will convict his heart on the matter of abortion, bring him to repentance for his past actions, and raise him up again as a defender of the most powerless and vulnerable among us: those who, like the slaves of centuries past, are denied the most basic human protections, in this case not because of the color of their skin but because they have not yet been born.I will be praying. May God’s will be done.

Closing comment on Barack Obama

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from the Baseball Crank:

As I have said over and over: vote for the left-wing Democrat machine politician, if what you want is a left-wing Democrat machine politician, no more and no less. But really, if he wins, don’t expect anybody, a year from now, to take seriously the idea that he was ever anything else. The two-steps like this are just about concealing who he is and what he stands for.

Fake Scandal of the Month Club: Sarah Palin cleared

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Via the Baseball Crank:

We have news from Alaska that the investigator for the State Personnel Board has issued a report—contrary to the findings of the Legislature’s independent investigator—and concluded that Gov. Palin did not abuse her authority in the case of State Trooper Michael Wooten, the controversy over “Tasergate” or, if you prefer, “Troopergate.”

Read the whole thing.

My great concern about the Pelosi/Obama administration

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is that the keystone of their agenda, once they have the votes to make it happen (which they probably will as of next January), will be to change the rules to make it as difficult as possible to vote them out. The Baseball Crank dubs this “partisan entrenchment”; the folks over at RedState have compiled a list of steps the Left is already advocating by which they can accomplish this. These steps would, collectively, enable unions (which are a major Democratic money source) to regain power through coercion, empower voter-registration fraud on the Left, silence conservative voices in the media, skew redistricting to favor Democrats, and, of course, put more liberals in the judiciary to suppress challenges to the other steps. Again, all of these are things which Sen. Obama and congressional Democrats are already trying to do, so it’s not as if it takes a leap of imagination to come up with this agenda: it’s taken right from the existing record. I don’t mind losing a fair election—well, no, that’s not true, I do mind, but I accept it—but I mind intensely when people (on either side, my own included) are willing to break the process just to achieve their desired outcome. The first job of our politicians, I believe, is to shepherd the process to ensure that it’s as fair as it can be to everyone, whether fairness is in the best interest of their careers or not; things like the abolition of secret ballots in union elections, or of requirements designed to prevent vote fraud, are nothing short of reprehensible.In the end, on a practical level, I’m less concerned about this than the folks at RedState are; I think the next year or two are likely to go in such a way as to produce a major backlash against the Democratic Party, which I think will overwhelm and wash away these efforts before they can produce the kind of forcible political realignment for which the likes of Nancy Pelosi are hoping. Even if not, I suspect that some, perhaps most, of the measures on RedState‘s list could be successfully challenged in the courts. One way or the other, let’s hope so—for all our sakes.

This should be the integrity election

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but I’m pretty sure it won’t be.We have, running for president, a man of an unusually long and clear record of integrity in political life, in John McCain—not spotless, no, but several standard deviations above the norm—versus a man who has no such record, in Barack Obama, who abandoned his pledge to take public financing, whose campaign has taken deliberate steps to enable illegal donations, whose past is still largely unexamined (and who has taken significant steps to keep it that way), and who has shown himself willing to enlist surrogates, including political supporters and government agencies, to destroy those who challenge him, if they can. It’s gotten to the point, if I were a liberal, I still wouldn’t vote for Sen. Obama—I’d be organizing a write-in campaign for Hillary Clinton.

On reasons for an Obama victory

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I’ve said before that I expect Barack Obama to win next week, and that I expect his presidency to be bad for America. I’m afraid we’ll see a major national-security crisis to which he’ll respond ineffectively (especially since Joe Biden essentially predicted as much), a resurgence of the abortion holocaust (and especially among blacks) under one of the most pro-abortion politicians in the country, the return of stagflation with the revival of the redistributionist economic policies that produced it, a Carteresque ineffectiveness in the face of challenges, a crackdown on free speech to stifle criticism of his administration, and the domination of our government by the hard-left wing of the Democratic Party.That said, I think Obama’s going to win, and for all that I don’t think he’ll be a good president, I think it’s important for this country that he win. For one, I do not assume that America deserves to be blessed simply because we’re America; if I’m right that there are hard times ahead, I can’t deny the possibility that we as a nation have them coming to us. As nations go, this is a great one and a good one, but we are far from perfect—and those Christians who object to my saying this because they believe America has a special place in God’s plan should remember that “judgment begins in the house of God.” For another, I believe the church in this country deserves to be judged for its political idolatry; and it seems to me that this judgment must begin with its conservative wing, who must relearn not to put our trust in princes.And perhaps most importantly, I believe that John McWhorter is right: the time is such that an Obama win may well be necessary for its effects on “race” relations in this country. For all my pessimism about an Obama presidency, part of that is that I see tough times ahead regardless, and I think it’s quite likely true that the cost of an Obama defeat would be greater than the benefit. As McWhorter argues,

For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a “national conversation” on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a “level playing field,” something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over “the persistence of racism,” which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated. . . .The grievous result of this fetishization of racism would be that it would put a kibosh on the upsurge in black voters’ political engagement amidst the Obamenon. Newspaper articles would quote blacks disillusioned from getting excited about any future black candidate—e.g. “I thought maybe America was finally getting past racism but it turned out not to be true.” 2009 would be a year of countless panel discussions, quickie books, and celebrated rap couplets wallowing in the notion that the white man wouldn’t let Obama into the Oval Office where he belonged, urgently reminding us that to be black is still to be a victim.

HT: Justin TaylorFor all my pessimism, I think it’s important to remember this, and not to deprecate the very real symbolic value of an Obama victory—or the very real practical benefits of that symbolic value; I also think it’s important to recognize that justice demands something of this sort in partial balance for the national sin of slavery. I could wish it were someone else, a Harold Ford or a Michael Steele, but Barack Obama is clearly the man God has chosen for this moment, for his own purposes; and it remains true that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”