Gas prices: onward and upward

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I argued in a post last Wednesday that gas prices will be Barack Obama’s Achilles heel, but that post was incomplete.  I argued that speculation in oil futures (which played a major role in the surge in gas prices after Nancy Pelosi took the speaker’s chair in the House of Representatives) will once again be a major factor, given that the Democratic Congress and administration have foreclosed the possibility of expanded domestic drilling, which was the most important element in driving the price of oil futures down.  I left out a couple other reasons, though.

First, tied to this, one reason why the current administration and congressional leadership are opposed to energy development (aside from, as noted, wind, solar, and the like) is that they don’t think higher gas prices are a bad thing.  Ideologically, they’re committed to reducing fossil-fuel consumption by whatever means they can find to hand, and they recognize that higher prices mean lower usage; therefore, while they’ve been chary about coming out and saying it where people can hear them, they’re all in favor of gas prices going up.  If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be pushing their “cap and trade” bill (that Rep. Henry Waxman, who’s leading the charge on this, hasn’t even read) so hard; after all, let’s call a spade a spade here, what is this thing?  It’s an energy tax, and when it passes (it might take a while, but they’ll figure out a way to get it through Congress), it’s going to boost the price of gas even more.

Second, President Obama has allies in this effort to push gas prices up—allies with names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez.  It is very much in the interests of oil-producing states like Iran and Venezuela to see gas prices go back up so that they will have more money—which their tin-horn-tyrant rulers will then use, not to better the lives of their people, but to fuel their geopolitical ambitions (which is, not so incidentally, not in the interests of America).  As such, they’re going to do whatever they can to return oil prices to the highs they saw last summer.  It’s an effort in which they will no doubt be grateful for the help they get from the U.S. government; one wonders how long it will be before they start channeling Lenin and talking about “the useful idiots in the White House.”

Susan Boyle strikes again

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HT:  Allahpundit

I have to say, I don’t think she actually sang as well this time—her pitch was a bit wobbly starting off, I thought, and her phrasing could have stood some work—though part of that is likely the fact that I’m no great fact of the song she chose; but I’ll admit, lyrically, it was a perfect fit for her this time (as was her previous choice; she does seem to have a knack for that).  I have to say, while I admire the ease with which she just sails through the high passages, I think my favorite part of this clip is the opening, and the utterly different reception she gets this time as opposed to the beginning of her first appearance.  Gone is the skepticism (along with some of the dowdiness); she’s a star now, and she’s greeted with eager and affectionate anticipation.  It’s really cool.

To the Glory of God

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(Psalm 29; Ephesians 1:11-14)

I want you to know that the Devil hates what you’re doing. Any time the people of God gather to worship God, to give him glory and hear the gospel preached, he loses; and so he’ll do anything in his power to prevent it. On an individual basis, he’ll try to prevent it by convincing people not to come. There was a gospel quartet in my church growing up—they called themselves “The Master’s Four”—and one of their signature songs was called “Excuses, Excuses.” I could probably sing about half of it even now, for all that it’s been twenty years and more since the last time I heard it, but I’ll spare you my attempts to play tenor. The verses are lists of the various sorts of excuses people use to get out of going to church—“Oh, the weather, it’s too hot; or maybe it’s too cold. In the springtime, when the weather’s just right, you have someplace else to go”—and the chorus sums it all up: “Excuses, excuses, you hear them every day; oh, the Devil, he’ll supply them if from church you’ll stay away. When people come to know the Lord, the Devil always loses, so to keep those folks away from church, he offers them excuses.”

Obviously, though, that works on some, but not on everyone; for all the Devil’s best efforts, a lot of people do still show up on Sunday mornings. So what’s he going to do? Yes, he’s doomed to fail, but he’s going to take as many people as he can down with him, and you should never underestimate his cunning. If he can’t keep us from worship, he’s going to try to neutralize our worship by turning our hearts away from our Lord and getting us to worship something other than Christ.

Tim Keller, of Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan, talked about this at the conference last month, that we all have our idols and our temptations to idolatry—our spouses; our kids; our reputations; our jobs; our possessions; anything of real value to us, anything that’s truly meaningful to us and that truly matters in our lives, can become so important to us that it takes God’s right and proper place in our lives. The church can become an idol—usually the local congregation, but I know folks for whom I’d say their denomination has become an idol—and so can our nation and our patriotism. For many churches, of course, style of music is an idol; for some, the building becomes an idol. That was a problem in Colorado, for example. (It probably still is.)

These are all good things which we rightly love and value. We ought to love our families, we ought to love this church and be grateful for this building, we ought to love our nation and thank God every day for blessing us to live here, and certainly we ought to value the work he has given us to do. We ought to love music, which is a wonderful gift from God, and naturally we will prefer some kinds to others. But every last one of these things must—must—come second in our hearts to God; it’s not that we need to love them less, but that we need to love Jesus Christ more than any of them, and our first and foremost desire should be to serve and honor and glorify him by giving him pleasure, with our love for all those other people and things falling in order behind our love for him.

What we need to realize, and what we need to remember, is that God has shared his victory with us not for our glory but for his own. One of the chief reasons that his victory in our lives often doesn’t look like what we would expect it to look like is that it isn’t our victory for our purposes, but his victory for his purposes. As such, his victory is not about us getting what we want, or making us look good, or keeping us from hard times, or things going the way we think they should; that’s the mistake all those folks made who were prophesying that McCain would win back in November, because they were sure they knew what God’s victory had to look like. Some of them, their faith was shaken when they turned up wrong.

For my part, I agree with them that Senator McCain would have been a better president than Senator Obama, but that’s not the victory God intended, and not the victory toward which he was working; if we identify our own preferred causes with God’s, if we think that God’s glory requires that we get rich or that our church have more people, if we forget that America is not the kingdom of God to which we pledge our highest allegiance, we’re going to get those kinds of unwanted surprises, because we’re going to build up expectations that have nothing at all to do with what God’s actually on about. God may be intending to do what we want him to do, but then again, he may not—and even if he is, it might not come the way we expect, or look the way we think it will look. He does not promise to fulfill our expectations, he promises to glorify his name, and what glorifies him in our lives isn’t always what we think of as glorious.

That’s one reason why God allows us to suffer. We’ve talked about some of the reasons for that over the last couple weeks, but here’s another one: it’s often in our suffering that God is most glorified in our lives. John Piper captured this well in a sermon he gave some time ago, in which he launched into a full-throated assault on the so-called “prosperity gospel”; in the course of that, he said this [Note:  video below]: “When was the last time that any American, African, Asian ever said Jesus is all-satisfying because you drove a BMW? Never! They’ll say, ‘Did Jesus give you that? Well, I’ll take Jesus!’ That’s idolatry! That’s not the gospel. That’s elevating gifts above Giver. . . . God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him in the midst of loss, not prosperity.”

God wants us to know, even in the moments of the deepest agony our hearts could ever conceive, that he is enough; that he is good, that he will take care of us, that he will get us through it—and to be able, even through our tears and our pain, to affirm that in faith. As Dr. Piper says, it is that more than anything else that makes God look glorious as God, “not as giver of cars or safety or health,” but as God, because that shows his real power in our lives. The gods of this world can give us prosperity, though they are hard and demanding and fickle; they cannot sustain us in times of pain. Only God can do that.  As Howard Vanderwell of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship put it in discussing 1 Peter 1:1-9, “God had in mind to use [our trials] as an exhibit of genuine faith. The exhibit of such genuine faith lifts others, defeats the schemes of Satan, and brings glory to Christ.”

This is a strange thought to us, that God would want to be glorified in our suffering; but I think it’s strange in part because of the ideas the world gives us about glory. For God to be glorified means that he is seen and recognized for who he is in his true nature and character; this is why the Bible talks of Christ being glorified on the cross, because on the cross he showed the depths of his love for us, and how far he was willing to go and how much he was willing to endure and bear for our sake. It’s in his death on the cross that we see most clearly the nature and character of our God.

Similarly, what is the greatest thing God does in our lives? What shows his power and character and love most clearly? It isn’t the good times, because most people have good times, and they come for a lot of different reasons. It isn’t the times that nothing bad happens, because we quickly grow accustomed to that—we think of that as “normal life,” and don’t see all the bad things that could happen that he prevents. We don’t see the times that we don’t get into a nasty traffic accident because that driver over there took a different route across town this morning, or maybe called in sick with a bad cold instead of trying to fight it off and go to work, and so we don’t give God credit for those times. It isn’t our successes, because we usually take them for our own—we may thank God for them, but most of the time we really believe that we made them happen ourselves, and so does everyone else (both of our successes and their own). In all these things and all these times, there is really nothing to distinguish the people of God from those who are not his people, for as the Scriptures tell us, the rain that gives life to the crops falls on the just and the unjust alike.

Where we are distinguished from those who do not walk with Christ, where we see the power of God and the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives most clearly, is in the hard times in our lives, in our times of loss and suffering and struggle, as we see him lift us up and support us. This is when we see his character most clearly, because we can see that his goodness to us goes beyond giving us things to caring for us when we’re in need, when we’re in pain, when we’re hurting and blaming it on him, when we’re angry at him for allowing us to suffer. We can see that God doesn’t return anger for anger and blame for blame, nor does he expect or even want us to lie to him and tell him things are fine when he knows as well as we do that they aren’t. Instead, he takes it all, and he loves us and cares for us and supports us—directly, by his Spirit, and indirectly, through his people—and he gives us hope that there is a better future coming, when all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, as Julian of Norwich wrote. He enables us to sing songs of praise at funerals, because we know by his faithfulness that pain and death and grief and loss do not have the last word, for there is a resurrection. He enables us to overcome, to find his victory in the midst of our circumstances, and to keep going, finding comfort in him as we journey through the valley of the shadow of death, trusting that we will emerge at last on the other side.

It is in this, most of all, that God is glorified in us, because it’s in this that his hand is most clearly seen; it’s in such times that we have the least temptation to give anyone or anything other than God the glory. When things are going well, we’re especially vulnerable to those efforts of the Devil that I mentioned earlier to turn our hearts away from God and toward anyone or anything else. It’s easy in good times to focus on our gifts rather than on the Giver—not that we forget about him, exactly, we just don’t think about him all that much, because let’s face it, we don’t really have to. We can just kind of cruise along at our own speed, under our own power, and things go pretty well, and let the world pull us into the consumer mindset as we go along building the life we want at a price we can afford.

It’s even easy to let that infect our view of the church—and so over the last quarter-century or so of prosperity, we’ve seen a lot of churches and other organizations grow large and rich appealing to religious consumers, playing off the unexpressed but potent assumption that church exists like everything else does, to give us what we want. We’ve seen churches come to assume that worship is a product which is consumed by attenders, and that it should be marketed and sold like any other product; the gauge for whether worship is successful or not is whether people enjoy it and feel it meets their desires and expectations, and thus whether or not they want to come back and consume it again the next week.

Biblically speaking, that’s not worship, and that’s not what worship is about. Our worship shouldn’t merely express where we are now, it should also form us to be what Jesus calls us to be—namely, his faithful followers—by inspiring in us love for him and gratitude for all he has done for us. It is a discipline in which we engage and to which we submit—one which is, yes, rewarding and fulfilling, but not because of anything we do, but rather because of what God does in us. True worship moves us toward the understanding that all of life is to be lived to and for the glory of God.

As I’ve said before, I believe gratitude is the key element in that. I know people who try to live the Christian life by main effort, as a matter of duty—or because they’re terrified of going to Hell—and that doesn’t work, because there’s no joy in it; God is glorified in us when we’re responding to him and thanking him and praising him not out of fear or duty, but because we love him and because we truly appreciate and are grateful for all he’s done for us. And as with anything important, we learn by doing. We learn to love God better by loving him, by expressing our love to him and devoting time to worship and honor him and him alone; we learn gratitude by remembering what he has done for us, telling the stories over and over to ourselves and to each other, and by thanking him for his blessings. We learn as individuals to live life to the glory of God by coming together as his people to glorify him, to give our time over to him and let him work in us as he will. Doing this together here trains us to do it out there—which is why, as I said, anytime we gather together and worship God, the Devil loses, and why he’ll do anything he can to keep us away or undermine our purpose; because if he can keep us from giving glory to God and God alone in here, he can stop us from doing it out there. May it never be so for us.

Using faith for political ends

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I’ve written a couple posts now on the dangers of what I’ve called “theologized politics,” which may be briefly defined as the appropriation of religion and religious believers by political parties as tools to be used to achieve political ends (chiefly, winning elections).  A good illustration of this would be recent Democratic efforts to draw religious (primarily Christian) voters away from the Republican party. Most such efforts have been rooted in the work of George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, and particularly his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.

In Dr. Lakoff’s view, the reason for the political success conservatives had been having through 2004 lay not in conservative ideas and policies but rather in conservative manipulation of language. As he put it,

Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing.

Dr. Lakoff’s response was to found a think tank of his own, the Rockridge Institute. The purpose of this think tank, as he described it, is “to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective,” by asking, “What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?”

Dr. Lakoff first published his book in 1997, but his ideas really began to catch on following the 2004 presidential election. Ellen Goodman’s column of November 7, 2004 in the Boston Globe, which explicitly cites his work, provides one example:

This is the time for the losers to go back to basics, to restate their views into a basic simple, straightforward language of values and morals. It’s the time to parse what we believe in. Especially right and wrong.

The title of Goodman’s column, “Taking back ‘values’,” makes the point clear: following Dr. Lakoff, the issue wasn’t Democratic policies, but only the language in which they were presented. Explain to Republican voters that poverty is a moral-values issue, and raising taxes is a moral-values issue, and so on, and they’ll vote Democratic instead. This is the assumption on which the Democrats have been working ever since; thus for instance we have Howard Dean’s complaint that pollsters “have largely missed the story [in the 2008 primaries] because they’re using an outdated script, which leaves the impression that religion and faith matter only to Republicans . . . this bias . . . has in turn shaped news coverage, making it appear that one party has a monopoly on religion in this race.”

There is much that could be said in response to and assessment of this approach; for starters, Dean was certainly correct to point out that there are a lot of Christians in this country who vote Democrat, even if this fact does seem to elude most members of the American media. For present purposes, however, the most important point to note is that this is yet another instance of theologizing politics. Rather than subjecting political positions and platforms to theological scrutiny, this approach seeks to take existing positions and apply a veneer of religious language; rather than reflecting on them theologically and seeking to evaluate them accordingly, it assumes a positive evaluation and simply presents them as positions supported by Christian teaching.

Now, this should not be taken as a partisan criticism, for this is not something of which Democrats alone are guilty. Indeed, Dr. Lakoff has at least this much right: the Democratic Party came late to the game on this one. For all the biblical language used in Republican rhetoric, and for all the identification of American evangelicals with the Republican Party, there’s really very little in the way of meaningful theological engagement with much of the party platform. Some issues, certainly, are grounded in biblical and theological statements (most notably abortion), but the argument at these points tends to be issue-specific, not part of any coherent whole with the rest of the platform; on issues such as tax policy or immigration policy, there has been a strong tendency among evangelical Republicans to baptize conservative positions as the properly Christian thing to believe without really evaluating them.

This set the stage for the Obama backlash among a certain subset of self-identified evangelicals in the 2008 election. He didn’t actually gain many evangelical votes, but the ones he did attract tended to be very loud; he also managed to appear sufficiently unthreatening that many other evangelicals felt it safe to indulge their displeasure with John McCain and stay home instead of voting.  Among both groups, there was the sense that the Republican Party has been happy in years past to pay lip service to evangelical concerns in order to raise money and turnout, but has done little or nothing to actually address those concerns in a meaningful way; party leaders haven’t taken voters’ faith seriously, but have only seen it as something to be used and manipulated to their own ends.  This sense has been growing stronger for some time, and in 2006 and 2008, it manifested in voter defections that returned the Democratic Party to power.

In my view, that sense is entirely fair, and entirely unsurprising.  The thing about theologized politics is that it essentially amounts to the subversion of faith for political ends, leaving the political platform—and party—in the dominant position; religious folk are welcomed at the fundraising counter and the volunteer meeting, but when it comes to the actual making of policy we’re expected to just shut up and soldier.  This is what evangelicals found with the GOP—which is why so many of us are backing away from the party, even if we’re just as conservative as we ever were (or maybe especially so, since the party definitely isn’t)—and it’s what those who bought the rhetoric and voted for the candidate of Hopeychangeyness are now finding with the Democrats as well.  It is, after all, in the nature of political parties to use whatever they can with as little return commitment as they can; anything freely offered will be freely taken, with no sense of reciprocal obligation.

As a matter both of faithful Christian discipleship and of intelligent political engagement, then—and make no mistake about it, the former requires the latter—the critical need at this time is for Christians in America to break out of this pattern and assert a new model for the interaction between faith and politics; and to do that, we must begin with ourselves.  We must begin, as I wrote last time,

to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.

And on that ground and no other we must assert ourselves in the political life of this nation, not as docile sheep to be shorn for the advancement of the agendas and ambitions of politicians and parties, but as independent agents for the glory of God and the advancement of the work of his kingdom.

Getting Trek right from the beginning

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Sara and I finally got the chance to go see the new Star Trek last night, thanks to a couple in the church who took our kids for the evening (and a wonderful time was had by all, too; we have some great folks in this congregation), and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.  In reinventing Trek, J. J. Abrams and his writers managed to make it what it should have been; they did an amazing job of keeping the characters true to themselves while justifying the reinvention of the series through the story they told.  In a way, the plot exists to explain and validate the creation of a whole new version of the same crew, and it succeeds fully in that.  Of course, that’s an ulterior purpose; The Phantom Menace succeeded in its ulterior purpose, too, but failed dismally as an actual movie.  Star Trek, by contrast, is a smashing success.

I’ve read some complaints about the plot being full of holes and overly dependent on coincidence, but I don’t agree; by and large, I’d say that the necessary coincidences arise logically out of the agency of the plot.  The one ringing exception to that is the coincidence of Montgomery Scott’s introduction into the movie, which is implausible to the point of indefensibility; I’m not sure it quite rises (or sinks, if you prefer) to the level of deus ex machina, but it’s pretty close.  For the rest, though—sure, there are coincidences, but they’re reasonable consequences of past events, and as McAndrew would say, “The laws of probability not only permit coincidences, they insist on them.”

I saw someone complain that what the old Spock tells Kirk doesn’t square with what he tells young Spock, but it doesn’t seem to me there’s cause for criticism there; he explains that himself in admitting that he misled Kirk in order to assure that Kirk did not only what he wanted, but in the way that he wanted it, as a way of trying to repair the breach between the two.  As for Eli’s comment that “the villain’s method of attack is very creative, but basically requires that planetary defense systems are non-existent”—point taken, but that’s Trek.  As a fan of the military SF of folks like David Weber and John Ringo, the idea of an interstellar power without extensive planetary defenses sounds ludicrous to me, too, but Trek never has had them.

In other ways, though, Abrams and company have made Starfleet, and the crew of the Enterprise, a lot more believable.  Everybody has a job that actually means something, and everybody gets to contribute.  Sulu isn’t just turning the wheel, and Uhura doesn’t just answer the phone; in fact, the changes in the character of Nyota Uhura are the biggest improvement in the whole movie.  Not only is she introduced as a genuinely impressive human being—a tough, intelligent, independent woman who needs that intelligence and independence to do her job—but her specialty, communications, is finally shown to be a real specialty of real and critical importance, one that needs a good xenolinguist (scholar in alien languages—which she is) if it’s to be done well.  They’ve set up the crew as a true ensemble in a way that the original never was.

Roger Ebert, in his review, complained that “the Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action,” and I’ll grant that there’s some justice to his charge; as a practical matter, he provides the defense himself when he notes that “the movie deals with narrative housekeeping,” setting up the new cast for sequels, but that doesn’t change the fact that this movie has things happen which implicitly raise huge issues that are never addressed on-screen.  A bit more introspection along Roddenberry’s lines, I think, would be a good thing, and I do hope we’ll see some thoughtfulness as the sequels come along.

On the other hand, the movie is a cracking good adventure yarn, which has always been the core of Trek, and it does this a lot better in some ways than Roddenberry did, too.  For one thing, while the scripts Roddenberry oversaw “might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy,” they never put anything really at risk; there were never any long-term negative consequences for any of the permanent cast.  (The one exception to that I can think of might be “The City on the Edge of Forever.”)  The same cannot be said of the new Trek, which inflicts staggering losses on its version of the Federation. I admire Abrams’ guts, because I don’t think I would have had the nerve to have the Federation suffer that badly.

I’m no movie reviewer, but I enjoyed Abrams’ Star Trek immensely; I won’t call it great art, but for what it is, it’s excellent—I think it’s clearly the best version of Trek yet—and I look forward to seeing what the folks behind it have for us next.

The American self-help legalist’s Bible

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You may not know this, but Thomas Nelson recently produced something called The American Patriot’s Bible:  The Word of God and the Shaping of America.  I wouldn’t have known it except that my wife recently signed up as a book-review blogger and ended up reviewing it.  This appears to be a product much akin to the recent Green Bible from HarperCollins, except that where the Green Bible pushes environmental dogma, the APB pushes a politically conservative form of what Christian Smith dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism.”  As my wife wrote,

There is plenty to encourage the idea that what God wants from us is to work harder. There is nothing here for the broken, repentant sinner, aware of his own inadequacy, whose desperate hope is to fall at the foot of the cross and find grace.

When Jared Wilson writes about “the weird modern desire for legalism,” well, this appears to be the Bible to support that desire.  Thomas Nelson has not blessed the American church by producing it.

Dick Cheney’s ratings rising

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According to a recent CNN poll, the number of Americans with a favorable opinion of Dick Cheney has risen eight percent since he left office; his ratings are still lower than NBC’s, but they have at least improved significantly.  The obvious explanation for this is his media tour; now that he, freed from the Bush administration’s shackles, has begun publicly defending himself and the administration and pleading the case for its policies and actions (as in the speech he gave this week at the American Enterprise Institute), people are listening.  Now that someone is actually presenting the defense for the Bush administration—something President Bush never did, and doesn’t seem to have wanted anyone else to do—it’s having an effect.  In particular, I suspect he’s giving people reason to see the distinction between himself (and President Bush) and Barack Obama in a different light.

Of course, the media don’t want to admit this.  CNN polling director Keating Holland said (and you can almost hear the sniff),

Is Cheney’s uptick due to his visibility as one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration? Almost certainly not. Former President George W. Bush’s favorable rating rose 6 points in that same time period, and Bush has not given a single public speech since he left office.

As a response, this is, quite frankly, pathetic.  If Vice President Cheney were defending himself to the exclusion of President Bush, this would be logical; as it is, it doesn’t pass the smell test.  A far likelier explanation is that the vice president’s media tour is the cause of the rise in both their favorable ratings, because he’s addressing a major cause for the negative view of both of them.

Brand perception of the New York Times

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I ran across, courtesy of Chris Forbes, an interesting site called brand tags, which describes itself as “A collective experiment in brand perception. . . . The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is.”  The mechanism is simple:  the site displays a logo, and you enter the first word or phrase that comes to mind.  It then adds that tag to the tag cloud on that logo.  Once you’ve tagged enough brands, you can look at the tag clouds and see what people associate with various logos and brands.

One that I found particularly interesting was the tag cloud on the New York Times.  Among the largest ones, representing those most often entered, were some obvious ones like “newspaper,” and some positive ones like “authoritative,” “intelligent,” “reliable,” and “serious”; one of the largest was “crossword,” which probably shouldn’t have surprised me.  Along with “paper” and “newspaper,” though, the largest single one was “liberal,” and there were a number of other prominent ones associating liberal bias with the Grey Lady.  This isn’t surprising, but I did think it was interesting, and I don’t imagine it’s anything the folks at the NYT are happy about.  Click the link and see for yourself.

The politics of personal destruction, intra-GOP edition: take 2

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R. A. Mansour, explaining the reason and purpose for the founding of Conservatives4Palin, wrote,

Sarah Palin wasn’t able to return home from the campaign. The campaign continues, and she is forced to fight a war on two fronts—the local and the national. As long as the campaign continues, we’ll be here to watch her back.

This continues to be true; and the most frustrating part is that each of these fronts in turn has two fronts, as she is assailed both by liberals, from whom one would expect no better, and also by other conservatives.  I have to think that Reagan would be infuriated by the way in which his Eleventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican”) is routinely ignored when it comes to Gov. Palin; I also think that he would have no trouble diagnosing the reason.  President Reagan famously had a plaque on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish when you don’t care who gets the credit”; these people who are attacking her, and cloaking their attacks in the language of conservatism, aren’t doing so for reasons of principle, but because they care who gets the credit.  They care very much, and they don’t want it to be her.

What they fail to understand is that when you care who gets the credit, that sharply limits what you can accomplish—and the more you care, the more limited you are.  Hurting Gov. Palin may well increase the chance that Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Tim Pawlenty wins the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, but even more, it increases the chance that Barack Obama wins the 2012 general election.  The only politicians who profit from attacks on Sarah Palin are Democrats, and the only party that is helped is the Democratic Party.  Republicans of influence, be they in office or in the conservative media, need to grow up, shut up, and stop trying to run down Gov. Palin, because not only is it wrong, it’s only going to hurt them and their preferred causes, not help them; the knife they plant in her back is the knife in their own.  Republicans acting like Democrats only profits Democrats.

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel

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I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won’t be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney’s fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can’t be held to the same standard as other presidents.  It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor’s VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don’t think people will buy it; we’re too accustomed to the Harry S Truman (“The buck stops here”) approach for many people to swallow “It’s not my fault” coming from our president.  We’ll take a lot of things, but I don’t believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them.  However, let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong.  Let’s suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it’s all Dick Cheney’s fault.  Let’s suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs.  Let’s suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it’s just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.

There’s still one thing that the president won’t be able to duck, and it’s something no one seems to be thinking about:  gas prices.  For whatever reason, all the prognostications I’ve seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they’ll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won’t.  Indeed, they already haven’t.  Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they’re sitting at $2.459, and they’re only going to keep going up.  It won’t be long before they’re back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.

Why?  Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress’ action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire.  The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas.  That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly “green.”  That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they’re already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity.  With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we’ll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.

And if I’m right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say “I told you so.”  It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.