Monthly Archives: August 2009

The gospel war in our hearts

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The gospel of Christ’s painful death on our behalf has a way of breaking our pride and our sense of rightful demands and our frustration at not getting our way. It works lowliness into our souls. Then we treat each other with meekness flowing out of that lowliness. The battle is with our own proud, self-centered inner person. Fight that battle by faith, through the gospel, in prayer. Be stunned and broken and built up and made glad and humble because you are chosen, holy, loved.

—John Piper, This Momentary Marriage

I have nothing to add to that; I just want to lift up the truth of this this evening.

HT: Of First Importance

John Mackey, Mark Steyn, and the intolerance of “tolerance”

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A couple weeks ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an excellent piece on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal—I posted on it at the time—drawing lessons from his company’s experience with health-care benefits and laying out a free-market alternative to Obamacare. The result has been a nasty backlash from leftists who are outraged to discover that their favorite socially-responsible grocery store isn’t dedicated to all their socialist causes; there is of course a petition (isn’t there always, these days?), which declares,

Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.

“Deceived”? Really? Has Whole Foods ever claimed in the past to support socialized medicine? No, the “deception” is all in the mind of folks on the left. They simply and unquestioningly assumed that because the company is opposed to factory farming and other aspects of the modern agricultural industry, it therefore must be equally liberal on every other point; now, since its CEO has revealed himself not to be a socialist on the issue of the day, they assume he must have been lying about everything else—and must be, among other things, “anti-union.”

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. As an example, Michelle Malkin offers this letter from a Whole Foods employee:

I work for Whole Foods, and I am a long time loyal employee. I love our company, and our CEO! John Mackey stands for what he cares about and believes in! This company offers awesome benefits and puts us team members first!

She also cites a commenter on the company’s online forum, who writes,

  • Mackey lectures at Universities about the horrors of factory farming
  • He says “Right now, Americans have to pretend factory farms don’t exist. They turn their eyes away, because there’s no alternative, there’s no choice. Once there is a choice, we will allow ourselves to be outraged.”
  • He makes $1 a year and donates his stock portfolio to charity.
  • He set up a $100,00 fund to help his employees with personal problems.
  • He’s a vegetarian and his company will not buy from producers that treat their animals unethically.
  • He flies commercial, rents the smallest cars, and stays in the cheapest hotel rooms – not because he’s cheap, but because he has no need for largesse
  • He and his wife participate in yoga
  • He gives over $1 million a year to animal welfare groups, education, relief work, and spiritual movements.
  • Employees have full say in who they work with—a new employee must receive a 2/3 vote in order to make it past probation.
  • Employees also vote on all company-wide initiatives
  • There’s a salary book in every store—“no secrets” management believes everyone should know how much everyone else is making
  • Executive salaries are capped at 14 times the lowest workers salary—If they want more money, everyone else has to get more money first
  • Non-executive employees hold 94% of company stock options
  • Pay is linked to team performance—profit sharing
  • At least 5% of annual profits go to local charities
  • Full-timers get 100% of their health care costs paid for—under plans the employees have selected
  • “They just have a lot more respect for you as a person here,” says an employee
And because he had a different idea about how the United States can fix it health care situation, none of this matters? He’s a caring person and many of you want to treat him like a monster. Why? Not because he opposes reform, but because he’s bringing more ideas to the table.

Read her whole post; the person who e-mailed Malkin that comment has a remarkable account of falling in with Mackey and his friends on the Appalachian Trail and spending a few days hiking with him.

As for the commenter and his question: yes, because Mackey had a different idea from the Left, none of that matters; as Andrew Breitbart points out, such is the true nature of the liberal idea of tolerance. You see, it breaks down this way:

  • Tolerance is the highest virtue.
  • Tolerance means affirming everyone no matter what they believe.
  • Except that, since tolerance is the highest virtue, we must not tolerate those who are intolerant.
  • Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who are unwilling to affirm everyone no matter what they believe.
  • Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who do not believe the same way we do about tolerance.
  • Which is to say, tolerance is only for those whose beliefs we find acceptable.

Which is, definitionally, intolerance. I hasten to say, I have no necessary problem with that; there are certainly things which any rational person should refuse to tolerate, and we all have the responsibility to figure out where to draw that line. There’s no law saying that those who disagree with me have to find my opinions tolerable.

However. I do object to people cloaking their intolerance in the language of “tolerance” and calling me “intolerant” for disagreeing with them—that kind of Orwellian Newspeak is something which I find, yes, completely intolerable; and I especially object to them using it as a weapon to expand their own right to free speech while infringing on mine, and on the rights of those who share my positions. If they want to boycott Whole Foods, let them go on ahead—I don’t agree with it any more than I agreed with the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, but it’s their money, they can spend it however they wish—but the organized efforts we’ve been seeing from the likes of SEIU and the Obama administration to silence dissenters on Obamacare are quite another matter.

And if you don’t believe that restricting free speech and silencing dissent from the party line is what this is all about, just look at Canada, and its system of “human-rights commissions”; they’ve turned into ideological kangaroo courts, determining which speech is protected and which isn’t, all based on their own ideas of what they would prefer to tolerate and what they wouldn’t. Fortunately, when they went after Mark Steyn (because the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like what he said about the effects of Muslim immigration), he fought back, and he had the kind of public profile and financial backing he needed to win; but not everybody is Mark Steyn, and not everybody has the tools and the support to defend themselves effectively, and so the result is still the chilling of freedom of expression.

That’s why Steyn said what he did in his testimony this past February before the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property . . .—in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence. . . .

It’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.

He’s right.

Is Rahmbo feeding a backlash?

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There’s a fascinating article up today on The Daily Beast by John Batchelor on “How Rahm Is Reviving the GOP”—one which is particularly fascinating because Batchelor is no GOP apologist. (Indeed, he makes such statements as “Suddenly the disgraced and demoralized Republican Congress has an unearned future,” and “The still lifeless Republicans . . . have avoided any credible renovation or even contrition for their decades of swinishness,” as well as quoting a “Republican partisan” as calling congressional Republicans “cowardly” and “brain-dead.” I should note, I don’t particularly disagree with any of this.) He describes “the superhuman clumsiness of a man who has made himself indispensable to the Obama administration and insufferable to the Democratic Congress,” and goes on to write:

The GOP always knew that Emanuel was a problem that could not be solved and could only be endured while he served three tempestuous terms in the House. But now the beleaguered Democratic majority is learning painfully that Emanuel’s talents for bullying, whimsical favoritism, cheerful power-grabbing, and self-congratulatory earthiness have transformed the first hundred days of the Obama administration’s seamless accomplishment into a second hundred days of blame and gloom. . . .

A twist of fate is that as Emanuel’s authority and ambition grow, reaching for swift closure to foreign commitments, staging bipartisan fantasy cruises, then reaching to construct Democratic-only laws that turn the theory of checks and balances into an unlimited credit card on the Treasury, the polling points not only to a rising tide of facedown Republicans but also to a sinking approval rating for a president who entirely controls Emanuel’s fate. Is there a lesson in the detail that the French Revolution waited too long to turn on Robespierre’s ruthless genius, and by the time the guillotine fell, the ludicrously reactionary aristocracy had rallied throughout Europe and led a counterrevolution that swept liberty into the ditch for another lifetime?

In between those two paragraphs are the details, which really are fascinating—and more than a little disturbing. Read the whole thing, and you’ll understand why Batchelor compares Emanuel to Robespierre.

Edward M. Kennedy, RIP

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There is little on which I agreed with Sen. Ted Kennedy, and I’ve never been much impressed with the Kennedy mythos; what’s more, I think his moral and physical cowardice at Chappaquiddick dishonored him. That said, it’s inappropriate to ignore the good things about people, and especially to do so with regard to one’s opponents; as such, I think it’s important to point out that there truly were some things about Sen. Kennedy that any fair-minded person would find admirable.

I like, for instance, what John Fund had to say:

Ted Kennedy and I didn’t occupy much political space in common, but I always admired his ability to build coalitions for the things he believed in, assemble a first-rate staff and bravely represent a coherent point of view. He was also a man who would answer your questions forthrightly and then invite you to have a drink.

In his last months, he and his wife Vicky also found time to come to the aid of a fellow cancer sufferer—my old boss and friend Bob Novak. He died only a week ago from the same type of brain tumor that felled Senator Kennedy. When the conservative columnist was diagnosed last year, Vicki Kennedy reached out to Novak with the lessons they’d learned about treatment. “He and his wife have treated me like a close friend . . . and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke University, which I did,” Novak wrote in one of his last published columns. “The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone’s life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington.”

He was a powerful, powerful advocate for the causes to which he committed himself—and his dedication was remarkable. As Bill Bennett writes,

Whatever one thought of him, there is no one in the Senate of his force, sheer power, and impact. If you think there is his equal in this, tell me who it is.

He fought hard, and sometimes viciously; but for all that, he seems to have earned a fair bit of sincere admiration and affection even from those on the other side of the aisle. Mitt Romney’s statement captures some of this:

In 1994, I joined the long list of those who ran against Ted and came up short. But he was the kind of man you could like even if he was your adversary. I came to admire Ted enormously for his charm and sense of humor – qualities all the more impressive in a man who had known so much loss and sorrow. I will always remember his great personal kindness, and the fighting spirit he brought to every cause he served and every challenge he faced. I was proud to know Ted Kennedy as a friend, and today my family and I mourn the passing of this big-hearted, unforgettable man.

Requiescat in pace, Edward M. Kennedy.

The leaven of the Pharisees and the loaf of politics

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I posted yesterday on this passage from Ray Ortlund’s blog:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

As I was writing, I remembered a somewhat similar passage from C. S. Lewis:

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

We may rightly call Lewis’ observation the political application of Dr. Ortlund’s point. I didn’t want to go that direction with my post, so I didn’t reference Lewis at that time. Denver Postcolumnist David Harsanyi did, though, in a recent piece (HT: Shane Vander Hart), applying Lewis’ point squarely to our president and his administration:

This week, President Barack Obama claimed his version of health care reform is “a core ethical and moral obligation,” beseeching religious leaders to promote his government-run scheme. Questioning the patriotism of opponents, apparently, wasn’t gaining the type of traction advocates of “reform” had hoped. . . .

On Team Righteous, we have those who meet their moral obligations; on the other squad, we must have the minions of Beelzebub—by which, of course, we mean profit-driven, child-killing, mob-inciting insurance companies.

Why wasn’t this multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders offended that a mere earthly servant was summoning the good Lord in an effort to pass legislation? Certainly, one of the most grating habits of the Bush administration was how it framed policy positions in moral absolutes.

As CBS News recently reported, Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush. Then again, no group couches policy as a moral obligation more than the left. On nearly every question of legislation, there is a pious straw man tugging at the sleeves of the wicked.

The problem with this, as both Lewis and Dr. Ortlund point out, is that it’s the ultimate version of “the end justifies the means”—if “we” are on God’s side and “they” are enemies of the right, the good and the just, then “we” don’t need to worry about any moral constraints, because the rightness of our cause automatically justifies anything we do in its service. This is the kind of thing that makes, at the extremes, a Torquemada, a Lenin, a Dzerzhinsky, a bin Laden—the people who will “torment us without end,” and do so “with the approval of their own conscience” because they know it’s for the best—indeed, because they’re really only doing it for our own good.

This kind of thing doesn’t make for good religion; it doesn’t make for good politics, either. As I said yesterday, the only real antidote to this is humility, and for all the degrees and other qualifications on display in the current White House, humility appears to be one thing that’s in short supply there. Fortunately, one good thing about democratic politics is that it’s usually pretty good about humbling those politicians as need it.

May it come soon.

Reading a book second-hand

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Now, there’s really no such thing as second-hand reading; it’s not like second-hand smoke, where you get to breathe the smoke that escaped someone else’s lungs. But there are times when someone else is so involved in a book that you get some of the effect—they keep reading you sentences or paragraphs, it keeps coming up in their conversation, and the book seems to be everywhere present.

Such has been my experience with my lovely wife and N. D. Wilson’s book Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World. She chose it to review as part of Thomas Nelson’s “Book Review Bloggers” program, and her capsule review is now up—I think she gives it 6.5 stars out of 5—but I think I can safely say that that won’t be the last thing she writes about it. Nor, I feel equally safe in saying, will this be the last thing I write about it. It’s an amazing book in what’s been a pretty good year so far for amazing books, full of godly wonder . . . which is a glorious thing.

If you want to know what’s really happening in Afghanistan

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read Michael Yon, who has established himself as the single most indispensable reporter from the Iraq-Afghanistan theater of operations. I’m realizing I’ve never linked to his site (that I’m remembering, anyway)—there’s always stuff I don’t get to, that falls by the wayside for lack of time or energy; it’s to my discredit that I’ve never actually gotten as far as posting on his work, because what he’s been doing is profoundly important.

And it’s only getting more important. He’s been embedded with the British forces there, butthey just canceled his ticket because of his last dispatch; this on top of financial problems which have forced him to appeal for support, without which he’ll have to give up his reporting and leave the country. If you care about what’s going on in Afghanistan, and are able to help support Yon’s work, it would truly be in your best interest (and the best interest of the nation) to do so.

This is a critical time for Afghanistan and Iraq both. As Yon testifies,

There is a crucial development and governance aspect to this war, and still a crucial smashing side. Sometimes you’ve got to swap hats for helmets. Mullah Omar is still alive, apparently in Pakistan, and he needs to be killed. Just on 20 August I heard a Taliban singing over a walkie talkie that Mullah Omar “Is our leader,” and they were celebrating shooting down a British helicopter only twelve hours before just some miles from here. . . .

The enemy often uses pressure cookers to make bombs, just as was done by the Maoists in Nepal. In Nepal, the government began confiscating pressure cookers (which angered many people), and the government often shut down cell service (angering many people) because the Maoists used cell phones. The Maoists won the war. We are operating far smarter in Afghanistan. Here it’s the enemy who actually shuts down cell towers—and this angers the people. Also, the enemy bombs around here are killing a lot of innocent people, and this also angers the people. Despite progress made by the Taliban, they alienate many people.

Meanwhile, Iraq is in a state of transition as the US is drawing down its presence there:

In the dangerous security vacuum that followed the demolition of Saddam’s regime, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) ignited a civil war by unleashing ferocious terror attacks against the country’s Shia community. Now that American soldiers have withdrawn from urban areas and created another partial security vacuum, the shattered remnants of AQI are trying to ramp up that effort again. It won’t be as easy for AQI now as it was last time. . . .

Terrorist attacks against Shias by AQI won’t likely reignite a full-blown sectarian war as long as the Sunnis continue to hold fast against the psychotics in their own community and Maliki’s government provides at least basic security on the streets.

Iraq’s Sunnis have as much incentive as its Shias to fight the AQI killers among them. They suffered terribly at AQI’s hands, after all. Out in Anbar Province, they violently turned against “their own” terrorist army even before the Shias turned against “theirs.” And Tariq Alhomayed points out in the Arabic-language daily Asharq al-Awsat that Maliki faces the same pressure to provide security on the streets, especially for his own Shia community, that any Western leader would face under similar circumstances—he wants to be re-elected.

The uptick in violence following America’s partial withdrawal shouldn’t shock anyone. If you scale back security on the streets, more violence and crime are inevitable. The same thing would happen in the United States if local police departments purged the better half of their officers. That does not mean, however, that Iraq is doomed to revert to war.

Last time I visited Iraq, Captain A.J. Boyes at Combat Outpost Ford on the outskirts of Sadr City warned me that we should expect this. “When we leave and transition all of what we do now to the Iraqi Security Forces, will there be a spike in [terrorist] activity?” he said. “Absolutely. One hundred percent.” He thinks Iraq will probably pull through just fine, even so. “It should be up to the media to portray this as something expected. There will be a spike in violence because the insurgents are going to test the Iraqi Security Forces, but I have complete faith that the resolve of the Iraqis will be there. Eventually, the bad guys will understand that the Iraqi Security Forces are here to stay. They are improved. They are vastly superior to anything we have seen in the past.” . . .

Before he was promoted to commander in Iraq, General Petraeus was known for his mantra “Tell me how this ends.” It was something everyone needed to think about, though no one could possibly know the answer to. Iraq makes a fool of almost everyone who tries to predict the course of events. How all this ends isn’t foreseeable. Nor is it inevitable. But the current spate of violence we’re seeing was.

As a country, we can’t afford to forget about Iraq and Afghanistan, as if nothing of any importance is happening there anymore just because they’re no longer useful to a media establishment that no longer wants to use them to bring down the president; what happens there matters a great deal, and we need to know what’s going on. For that, we need people like Michael Yon and Michael Totten, and we should be thankful for them.

Let it slide?

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 10
Q. Will God permit
such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not.
He is terribly angry
about the sin we are born with
as well as the sins we personally commit.

As a just judge
he punishes them now and in eternity.1
He has declared:
“Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do
everything written in the Book of the Law.”2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

God will not let sin slide, because he cannot; it would be unjust, it would be against his nature, it would be wrong, and it would be inherently contradictory. At its core, sin is the assertion of our own self-will against God’s will in a declaration of mistrust: it is the insistence that God neither knows nor truly cares what is best for us, and that we’re better off going our own way. That is a defiant falsehood in the eye of the one who is Truth, a falsehood straight from the pit of Hell; he could not simply ignore it without ceasing to be true, nor would he be doing us anything but ill if he could. Nor, in truth, would his doing so be welcomed; having rebelled against God, why would we want him to come crawling to us to take him back?

The leaven of the Pharisees

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I was reading back through Ray Ortlund’s blog this afternoon, trying to remember where I’d read something, when I came across this post that I’d missed three weeks ago—I have no idea how, because it certainly grabbed my attention this time:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let’s always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

He’s dead right. I’d actually go a little further and say that what he’s talking about is a combination of moral fervor and spiritual pride—that moral fervor combined with deep humility (as in a man like William Wilberforce) is a very different matter, because that’s a fervor which is rooted in our understanding of our own sin and our own need for grace, and thus is ultimately focused on Jesus Christ; spiritual pride, however, is focused on ourselves, it is self-exalting, and thus when combined with moral fervor puts us in a position which rightly only belongs to God—that of being the defender (which ultimately means the arbiter and the dictator) of the holy. Spiritual pride tells us that we’re already good enough to please God, and that therefore God is on our side as we judge all those people down there who aren’t; when combined with moral fervor, this makes the tyrant and the Inquisitor.

I agree with Dr. Ortlund that moral fervor, if not absolutely directed toward God, if not combined with deep humility and the dedication to “put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit” (as Paul says), is our deepest evil; and that illustrates why, as I’m becoming increasingly convinced, spiritual pride is our most invidious evil, because the subtlest and the most corrupting. It is spiritual pride which turns the greatest desire for holiness into the greatest deeds of darkness, which warps and blights every aspiration of the soul toward sainthood and twists them toward corruption; spiritual pride produces ungodly people who think themselves godly, and there is not much worse than that.

Further links on Obamacare

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For those who doubt that the purpose of the Democratic health care “reform” is a government takeover of our health-care system—and that the only unsettled issue in their minds is the best way to get there as quickly as possible—watch this:

Those opposed to the expansion of the abortion industry should consider this comment from Ed Morrissey:

On the campaign trail, Obama told Planned Parenthood that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate state restrictions on abortion and repeal the Hyde Amendment ban on federal funding for it, would be his first legislative priority. ObamaCare allows him to pass FOCA without the head-on fight. If the public option remains in the bill and it covers abortion, that will have the de facto effect of repealing the Hyde Amendment. The interstate nature of ObamaCare and the public plan may also allow the Department of Justice to fight state abortion restrictions, such as parental notification, on the grounds that the regulations interfere with interstate commerce. It’s FOCA by other means.

For those still dubious about Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels,” ponder this from Nat Hentoff (no fundamentalist Republican):

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)—as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill—decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It’s already in the stimulus bill signed into law. . . .

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

And if anyone is wondering why all the fuss—is this really that big a deal?—let Andy McCarthy explain:

These last seven months ought to tell us that the usual political rules don’t apply when predicting this president’s behavior. His purpose is revolutionary change in an American society he grew up understanding to be fundamentally unjust, racist, materialist, imperialist, and the agent of global misery. He is in Washington to transform the nation from the top down. Nationalized health care is key for him. If he gets it, sovereignty shifts from the citizen to the state. By law, government will be empowered to manage minute details of our lives. Over time—when, as the American Thinker’s Joseph Ashby observes, a “1,000-page health-care law explodes into many thousands of pages of regulatory codes”—that is precisely what government will do.

Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision. For my money (if I have any left), achieving it is more important to him than is getting reelected. His poll numbers and those of congressional Democrats may keep plunging (for the latter, there must come a point where that is statistically impossible), but they have the votes to Rahm this thing through.

And if it comes to that, they will most certainly try, unless enough Democrats in Congress get cold feet. Sure, that wouldn’t be what the president promised to get elected, but so far, that hasn’t stopped him yet: