Jesus didn’t come to save your agenda

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I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

—Philippians 4:11b-13 (ESV)

What we tend to miss when we take just that last verse, just that last sentence, out of context is that “I can do all things” does not mean “Jesus will help me do whatever I want.” The promises of God are not promises for our worldly success, they are promises that he is just as much in control and just as much sustaining us for our good in times of disaster and pain as in times of wealth and health. As Jared Wilson sums it up in a great post titled “Kill Your Jesus Talisman,”

Jesus is no talisman. Crucify “Jesus as key to your personal achievement” and he will stay dead. But the real Jesus achieves a victory greater and far superior to any wish-dream of any man. He is life itself, and life eternal. Worship that Jesus.

The Ministry of Parenthood

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(Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Ephesians 6:1-4)

You may have heard the story about little Johnny in Sunday school one day, when the teacher holds up a picture like this one and says, “Now class, what is this?” Johnny raises his hand, and when she calls on him, he says, “Well, it looks like a squirrel, but I know the answer is supposed to be ‘Jesus.’” We laugh at that because it’s silly, and probably many of us know someone who’s very sure that Jesus is the answer but has forgotten what the questions are; if Jesus is the answer just because that’s the answer you’re supposed to give, obviously, that doesn’t mean much. At that point, we’re right back to Doug in Up: “Squirrel!” But as my friend Jared Wilson pointed out in a blog post titled “Squirrels that Look Like Jesus,” when you move beyond “What has four legs and a bushy tail?” to the deeper questions of life, the questions with which the Scriptures are concerned, the answer really does come back to Jesus in the end. It always comes back to Jesus, because we’re all imperfect people, we all have parts of our lives that are really messed up, and we need grace—we need forgiveness, and help to get back up when we fall, and a way to get free of the junk in our lives—and we only find that in Jesus.

As an example of that, take this commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” That gives each of us a responsibility to our parents—even if our parents are dead; this doesn’t just say obey your father and mother, it says to honor them, which doesn’t end with their death. For those of us who have children, it gives us a responsibility to them, too: the profound responsibility to raise them to be the sort of people who will honor us, not because we require it from them, but simply because of who they are. God tells our children to honor their parents, and in so doing he hands us the job of raising them as people who will give honor, and who will themselves be honorable.

Which is, if you take it seriously, terrifying. How are we supposed to do that without screwing up? Tell truth, we can’t, not all the time. Of course, we aren’t the only ones who screw up—our parents did too, and most of us mostly survived the experience. We all do our best, and we all need grace for the times when our best ain’t that great; that’s just the way it is. But how do we make our best better—and maybe even something that looks sort of like good enough?

The answer is, not on our own. Hillary Clinton, back in the day, made famous an African proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child”; you may not agree with what she did with that, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Africans had a point. In my experience, they usually do on those sorts of matters. There is no one of us, and really no two or three or four of us, smart enough to raise a child well; we either need to get very, very lucky, or we need a community. We need the knowledge and experience of others who have been through this before and who have learned from mistakes and successes alike, and who can pass on the good advice they received from others; we need the wisdom of a community that can show us the things we’re missing, and help us fix things we’re doing as parents that are wrong or unhelpful; and we need the support of a community that can keep us on our feet when our burdens are bringing us to our knees.

Of course, not every community will serve us equally well. Oliver Twist offers an excellent illustration of that; Oliver finds a community with Fagin and his pickpockets, but it’s a community headed toward destruction. Sometimes, if we all gather together and bring only what we have in ourselves, what we end up with is nothing more than our collected foolishness. We need a community which is founded on true wisdom—not merely our human “conventional wisdom,” which is proven wrong about as often as right, but on the wisdom that comes from God; which must necessarily mean a community founded on the everlasting and faithful love and grace of God.

That’s why, in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people to love God with everything that’s in them, with all their might—to be completely sold out for God—and then to take God’s commandments and teach them to their children, not just once in a while, but throughout the day, every day, in every situation and everything they do. That’s the necessary foundation for a community that loves and faithfully follows God. It might sound like a tall order, but think about it: those of us who are parents are always teaching our kids, when we’re at home and when we’re on the road, when we go to bed and when we get up—we’re teaching them by everything we say and don’t say, by what we tell them to do and don’t tell them to do, by what we let them get away with and what we enforce. Everything we do teaches them something, and helps shape them into the kind of people they’re going to be. In biblical terms, by the things we say and the things we do, whether we’re intentional about it or not, we are most assuredly making our children disciples, followers, of something. The only question is, what?

In the end, everybody comes up with their own answer. Some people answer it by not bothering to answer it, or by not even considering the question; that very rarely ends well. Some answer it just by going along with what the world around us thinks; that also often doesn’t end well, since the world is fickle and unstable, not to be trusted. Some answer it by imposing laws and rules and harsh punishment; that may produce good behavior, but it often produces rebellion in the end, and it does not breed love, because it does not know grace. Children need grace. We all need grace, children are just more aware of it; we adults aren’t really any better, just better at faking it.

People come up with a lot of answers, but the Bible’s answer is consistent: if you want children who honor you, raise them to honor God. Bring them up, Ephesians says, in the discipline and instruction of the Lord; do it, Deuteronomy says, not just every so often, but throughout the day, as you find teachable moments. And don’t just tell them about rules and what they can’t do, either; that’s part of the picture, but not the central part. Tell them you love them, and God loves them, and that he made them special; tell them when they do something wrong, yes, but also admit it when you do something wrong, because we all need God’s grace and forgiveness—and by his grace, he’s always waiting to forgive us. Tell them that they don’t need to earn God’s love, that he loves them no matter what; and most of all, tell them about Jesus, who showed us just how much God loves us: so much that he was willing to become human and take the punishment for all the bad things we do, so that we wouldn’t have to, so that he could set us free, and make us better.

What President Obama should have done about the BP spill

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It’s probably too late now, but this administration that’s so fond of appointing “czars” for various jobs should have appointed an oil-spill czar, told them (and everyone else) that they had the full authority of the executive branch behind them, sent them down to Louisiana and told them not to come back until the hole had been plugged. They would have wanted someone who met several criteria:

  • Available immediately—no point in naming someone whose appointment would only delay matters
  • Experienced executive, particularly in dealing with large, complex projects
  • Experienced politician—given the political fallout, the political complications, and the need to keep the public informed, the job would need someone used to working on the national political scene
  • Experience in working politically with Big Oil, but independent from them—not someone on the payroll of any of the oil companies, but someone familiar with energy issues who has a track record of keeping them honest and cooperative
  • Some familiarity with the Gulf states, and/or relationships with their governors—wouldn’t need to be someone from that area, but someone who could reasonably expect to work comfortably and effectively with state and local governments in a manner that showed respect and appreciation for the cultures of the region
  • Ideally, a Republican—it isn’t likely that the GOP would have objected to the establishment of such a position, but if so, naming a Republican would have drawn their fangs, and given the President a bit of a bipartisan boost; also, of the governors of the Gulf states, there are four Republicans, three high-profile (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Bob Riley), and one who used to be (Charlie Crist), so naming a Republican would help in that regard

Now, it could be that I’m biased, but looking over this list, it seems to me that there’s one person above all others who would fit the bill: as Jason Killian Meath pointed out a couple weeks ago over at BigGovernment, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin.

The only downside here is that if Gov. Palin had performed well in that role, it would have boosted her political standing tremendously (though if she hadn’t, it would have hurt her but still helped the President). But if it was for the good of the country, and also the administration, wouldn’t that have been a price worth paying?

Maybe we should call him President BP Obama?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MzllR24e-FY

The incomparable Michael Barone writes,

Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology, and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.

Republican victories in 1984, 1988 and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence and in 1996 an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.

The one election in this period that is hard to classify was in 2000 and had a split verdict, with the Democrat winning the popular vote and the Republican the Electoral College.

That makes sense, if you think about it; polls have pretty consistently shown the US to be a center-right country, closer ideologically to the Republicans (though not by a lot), but the Democrats have pretty consistently shown themselves more capable at actually running government, and particularly at doing so in a way that’s consistent with their ideology. Given that the ideological content of the President’s policies is not all that popular right now, anything that makes him and his party look less than competent is bad news—and it’s starting to look like this disaster in the Gulf could be very bad news indeed. Dick Morris wrote in The Hill,

Conservatives are so enraged at Obama’s socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America’s beaches not only reminds one of Bush’s terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter’s incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

Of course, Morris has been anti-Obama all the way along, so it’s not as if there was any support here for the President to lose; but how about Peggy Noonan, a certified Obamacan? From her, we got the anguished cry, “He was supposed to be competent!”

The original sin in my view is that as soon as the oil rig accident happened the president tried to maintain distance between the gusher and his presidency. He wanted people to associate the disaster with BP and not him. When your most creative thoughts in the middle of a disaster revolve around protecting your position, you are summoning trouble. When you try to dodge ownership of a problem, when you try to hide from responsibility, life will give you ownership and responsibility the hard way. . . .

I wonder if the president knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

This is what happened with Katrina, and Katrina did at least two big things politically. The first was draw together everything people didn’t like about the Bush administration, everything it didn’t like about two wars and high spending and illegal immigration, and brought those strands into a heavy knot that just sat there, soggily, and came to symbolize Bushism. The second was illustrate that even though the federal government in our time has continually taken on new missions and responsibilities, the more it took on, the less it seemed capable of performing even its most essential jobs. Conservatives got this point—they know it without being told—but liberals and progressives did not. They thought Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush’s incompetence and conservatives’ failure to “believe in government.” But Mr. Obama was supposed to be competent.

Remarkable too is the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you’re drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.

How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We’re plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls? . . .

Republicans should beware, and even mute their mischief. We’re in the middle of an actual disaster. When they win back the presidency, they’ll probably get the big California earthquake. And they’ll probably blow it. Because, ironically enough, of a hard core of truth within their own philosophy: When you ask a government far away in Washington to handle everything, it will handle nothing well.

Of course, the President and other Democrats are trying to blame this one, too, on George W. Bush; but it just won’t wash. President Bush could have blamed 9/11 on Bill Clinton—if President Clinton had done his job better, al’Qaeda would never have been able to launch the attack (and Osama bin Laden might not even have been around to try). President Clinton could have spent all kinds of time at the beginning of his term blaming George H. W. Bush for the state of the economy. Ronald Reagan could have done the same with Jimmy Carter, since he inherited an economic mess that might have been worse than the one we’re in. Gerald Ford certainly would have had a great deal to blame on Richard Nixon. The list goes on. None of them did it; they took responsibility, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work solving the problems they’d been given to solve. That’s what Presidents do.

At the rate he’s going, we could expect to find Barack Obama in 2012 still campaigning against President Bush, still blaming everything bad on President Bush, as if he’d never been elected; this incessant blame game is indeed change, but not the kind of change people wanted—it’s unseemly. He needs to accept, as Noonan wrote months ago, that it’s his rubble now. That’s part of being the president, just as it’s part of being the captain of a ship: whatever happens, fair or not, it’s on you, and you need to step up and deal with it. Yeah, you get blamed for things that aren’t your fault. That’s life, it’s happened to every other president; you wanted the job, you got the job—all of it, not just the good parts. President Obama seems to be trying to only accept the good parts, and that has to stop.

To some extent, none of this should be at all surprising; at the time of his election, Barack Obama had no track record of successful executive experience to support the idea that he would in fact be a competent executive rather than just someone who talked a good game. I expected, wrongly, that we would see a major terrorist attempt on U.S. soil during his first year in office, as we had with his two immediate predecessors; I’m deeply glad to have been wrong about that, but not at all glad that the “ineffective, dithering response” I predicted to such a crisis has been the sort of response we’ve seen to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, it’s been worse than I thought, because as well as ineffective and dithering (even to the point of hamstringing the state of Louisiana’s efforts to protect itself), the President’s response has also been remarkably disengaged, which is something I would not have predicted.

Taken all in all, it’s enough to make one wonder—something which, as Sarah Palin noted, the media certainly would have wondered about a Republican president—if there’s any significance here to the fact that

During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and is the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past 20 years, according to financial disclosure records.

The administration and its allies have been trying to deny, play down, and obfuscate this fact, but the records show the falsity of their denials, and the fact that other oil companies have given more to other politicians really isn’t on point: the only actors here are the Obama administration and BP, and President Obama has been America’s biggest beneficiary of BP money. Has this influenced the way the White House has treated BP in all this? Did it play a part in their decision to “keep a close watch” on BP’s efforts and otherwise let the company deal with the mess as it chose? We don’t know; we ought to. The media ought to be asking, and they aren’t. Eventually, those questions are going to have to be faced, and answered. Right now, it certainly looks as if all that BP money to Barack Obama bought a fair bit of accommodation and slack from his administration.

As a final note, I think the guy who’s come off best in this disaster is James Carville. I’ve never cared much for the man, but I have to respect his honesty and passion on this one . . . this whole story makes me sick, and I’ve never even been to Louisiana—I can only imagine his agony at what’s happening to his home state.

In uncertain times, worship

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Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.

Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

Umm . . . about those “death panels” . . .

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The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare’s shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,

an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).

“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”

Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.

Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .

With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.

To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”

And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?

A deeply troubling development on the world scene

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is the accelerating pivot of Turkey from an ally of the West into the Islamist camp. It shouldn’t have been surprising, I suppose, given that its secularist parties were so corrupt; the effort to secularize a Moslem country was probably doomed to failure anyway, but when their corruption and incompetence left them with no moral legitimacy or political capital, there was no one to stand up to or counterbalance the radicals. The consequences are becoming increasingly dire:

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.

For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

Given this, the fact that Turkey was behind the deliberate provocation that was the Gaza flotilla is an ominous sign (though the fact that the administration, in the person of Joe Biden, was willing to stand up to them on Israel’s behalf is an encouraging one); a country that was for many years a key ally of the US in the region is now well on its way to becoming another Iran—and while the Turks lack the mullahs’ oil money, they are in all other ways in a far better position to damage us and our allies. If their current moves toward Iran turn into a long-term alliance, that would be an extremely difficult radical Islamic power bloc to counter; if they end up as rivals with Iran, the resulting conflict could be even worse. It’s hard to see a way this turns out well.

For lack of better options, if Turkey continues to swing in an Islamist direction, maybe the US and Iraqi governments need to get together and figure out a way to strike a deal with the Kurds—see if they would be willing to make concessions to the Iraqis in exchange for all-out assistance against the governments of Iran, Turkey and Syria. After all, as nervous as the government in Baghdad is about the Kurds, at this point one would think Iraq and the Kurds could find real common cause here.

It’s a great product, with one tiny flaw . . .

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This is the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk, available on Amazon.com for $24.95. No, this is not a joke—click on the link, it’s an actual product. In the product description, it says, “For safety reasons, never use this product while driving”—which is less reassuring than it ought to be; it also makes one wonder how many people really would rather do their work in a parked car rather than sitting at a desk. Judging by the user-submitted photos, the customer-submitted tags (including “accident waiting to happen” and “alcohol accessories”) and the customer reviews (some of which are quite funny), it would appear I’m not the only one dubious about the whole idea, or about how people who buy the thing are actually likely to use it. At least it was the inspiration for a great many wits (and would-be wits).

Is a Clinton-Obama war brewing?

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This from Politico makes me wonder:

Former President Bill Clinton returned to his home state Friday to help a beleaguered ally and delivered a broadside against some of the most powerful interests in the Democratic Party.

Using unusually vivid language to describe the threat against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Clinton urged the voters who nurtured his career to resist outside forces bent on making an example out of the two-term Democratic incumbent.

He pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

“This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here.

Clinton didn’t mention Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s name—the lieutenant governor worked in the former president’s administration—or single out any specific liberal groups. But he didn’t need to.

Halter, who held the incumbent to under 50 percent in the May 18 primary election, has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars in advertising from liberal groups and unions angry with Lincoln over her hesitance to support labor organizing legislation and ties to the business community.

It’s a clash that pits the ascendant forces of the progressive left against a centrist Southern Democrat cut from Clinton’s own Democratic Leadership Council mold, a proxy fight that the former president and longtime Arkansas governor sought to underscore by noting that Lincoln’s “opponent is not her opponent.”

This is especially true given the way the whole Sestak story has played out, with the White House trying to focus everyone’s attention on President Clinton (as opposed to, say, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, whom they admit asked President Clinton to talk to Rep. Sestak on the administration’s behalf). I can’t imagine he appreciates the “when in doubt, blame a Clinton” approach (as Tabitha Hale put it) that the Obama administration is using here.

There’s more to the story than that, though, as Susannah of The Minority Report points out in a piece at RedState; specifically, there’s the relationship between President Clinton and Rep. Sestak. Susannah makes the case—circumstantial but compelling—that President Clinton submarined President Obama here, and that he did so deliberately. If so, this is something neither man wants to come out officially, for differing reasons, but if there’s a better explanation of President Clinton’s conduct during the PA Senate primary, I can’t think of it. And certainly, President Clinton has plenty of reason to want to bring President Obama down—not just for the way the Obama campaign treated the Clintons during the presidential primaries, but for the way the President has treated Secretary Clinton since taking office.

I do have a couple disagreements with Susannah; for one thing, I don’t think she goes far enough—if matters indeed played out as she speculates, I’m sure that President Clinton not only encouraged Rep. Sestak to stay in the primary, but that he actively encouraged Rep. Sestak to campaign on the fact that the White House had tried to buy him off. For the other, yes, James Carville has always worked for the Clintons, but I don’t think we can see their encouragement in Carville’s recent verbal defenestration of the White House, because I don’t think we need to. Carville’s a Democrat, yes, he’s a Clintonite, yes, but before either of those things, he’s a Cajun. He wasn’t speaking as a political operative there, he was speaking as a man of Louisiana, and good for him.

Now, she could be wrong, and I could be wrong, and everything could be just fine between Barack Obama and the Clintons; but given that there’s never been any evidence of that, but plenty of evidence to the contrary, given that it makes the best sense of l’affaire Sestak, and given that President Clinton seems to have come out and declared war on Barack Obama’s base—well, given all those things, at the end of the day, I don’t think we are. I will be shocked if Peter Ferrara’s recent prediction that President Obama will resign before November 2012 comes true, but as for his earlier prediction that the President won’t stand for re-election—that, I suspect, is the Clintons’ goal. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and who ends up being the last one standing. For my part, I wouldn’t bet on Barack Obama.