Thanks to Bill for posting this:
About that honeymoon . . .
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?
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
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
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
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 . . .
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?
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.
Nancy Pelosi: the anti-accountability Speaker
This probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, and disappointed me as well: Nancy Pelosi has proposed rules changes to reverse the House reforms which were put in place as part of the Contract with America, reforms which
were designed to open up to public scrutiny what had become under this decades-long Democrat majority a dangerously secretive House legislative process. The Republican reform of the way the House did business included opening committee meetings to the public and media, making Congress actually subject to federal law, term limits for committee chairmen ending decades-long committee fiefdoms, truth in budgeting, elimination of the committee proxy vote, authorization of a House audit, specific requirements for blanket rules waivers, and guarantees to the then-Democrat minority party to offer amendments to pieces of legislation.
It would seem that Speaker Pelosi doesn’t want the House GOP to be able to hold her caucus accountable for their actions and decisions, and doesn’t want the public to be able to keep track of what they’re doing; and she certainly doesn’t want the House GOP to have any more input into legislation than she absolutely has to allow them. Sauce for the goose apparently isn’t sauce for the gander, in her book. Human Events’ Connie Hair may well be right to conclude,
Pelosi’s proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office.
HT: The Anchoress
Richard John Neuhaus, RIP
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of the Institute for Religion and Public Life and founding editor-in-chief of First Things, died this morning at the age of 72, of complications from cancer. I never met him—I’ve wanted to for years, but I knew it was highly unlikely that it would ever happen—and can’t say I knew him, apart from the occasional gracious correspondence by e-mail (I don’t know if my own experience is typical, but if it is, he has to have spent a lot of time e-mailing random readers), but I truly grieve his death. As a winsome, insightful, grace-bearing advocate for the gospel of Jesus Christ in our contemporary Western culture (and he was that, even as he never backed down from a fight he deemed worthwhile), he had few equals and fewer superiors over this past century. His death, coming so soon after that of Avery Cardinal Dulles, impoverishes not only the Catholic theological scene, but the whole church, in America and around the world. I have no doubt that First Things will continue strong under the leadership of Joseph Bottum, but as my wife pointed out when she called to give me the news, his own voice and perspective will never be replaced. I appreciate what Bottum had to say, which I think is just about perfect:
My tears are not for him—for he knew, all his life, that his Redeemer lives, and he has now been gathered by the Lord in whom he trusted.I weep, rather for all the rest of us. As a priest, as a writer, as a public leader in so many struggles, and as a friend, no one can take his place. The fabric of life has been torn by his death, and it will not be repaired, for those of us who knew him, until that time when everything is mended and all our tears are wiped away.
It is good and right that Bottum has chosen to repost today Fr. Neuhaus’ 2000 article “Born Toward Dying,” which the Anchoress rightly calls “deep, open, thoughtful, funny, moving and wise. Typically, so.” My only objection to her use of the word “typically” is that this really is Fr. Neuhaus at his best; it is, I think, a profoundly important piece, especially for our death-denying, thanatophobic culture.The Anchoress also posted a video of the Kings College Choir singing the seventh movement, “In Paradisum,” from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D minor, which suits beautifully here:
Requiescat in pace, Fr. Neuhaus.