Barack Obama, crony capitalist

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Score one for Bill Kristol:

Paul Krugman is, I think, right to be amazed by Obama’s embrace of the $17 million bonus given to JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

If Obama’s idea of moving to the middle politically is to embrace Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks, he’s crazy. Usually Republicans are the party of Big Business and Democrats of Big Government, and the public’s hostility to both more or less evens the politics out. But if Obama now becomes the spokesman for Big Government intrusiveness and the apologist for Big Business irresponsibility all at once—good luck with that.

Besides the political snark, though, Kristol has an important substantive point to make as well:

Doesn’t Obama realize how creepy this statement is? “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen.”

This confirms the suspicion that we now live in a world of crony capitalism, where if Obama knows and thinks well of you, then you don’t get criticized—but if you’re some guy who hasn’t spent a lot of time cozying up to government leaders, then you could easily be the object of demagogic assault by politicians.

I know many folks think conservatives are pro-Big Business without any reservation, qualification, or exception, but that’s not really true; conservatism, properly speaking, is decidedly anti-crony capitalism. In fact, one of the first signs that conservatives in government are ceasing to be true conservatives in favor of becoming creatures of the Beltway is usually that they begin to favor these sorts of deals; that is, or should be, one of the warning signs for conservative voters.

One other point to note, one which Bill Kristol (being an early supporter of Sarah Palin) undoubtedly knows, is that crony capitalism has been pretty much the normal order of business in Alaska for a long time; whether the people in office were Republicans or Democrats, state policy was effectively set by a bipartisan alliance of senior elected officials and the big oil companies. Or perhaps I should say, that had been the normal order of business, until Sarah Palin was elected governor and began throwing the bums out; and what she began, her successor, Sean Parnell, has so far continued. Taking fresh air, sunlight, and a new broom to crony capitalism has been a big part of her political career so far—and it looks like that’s really what we need in DC now, too. Sounds like a ready-made opportunity for a campaign.

The partisan mindset

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Gerard Alexander, a professor in the political science department at the University of Virginia, contends that liberals have a particular problem with condescension:

American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension. . . .

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government—and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling’s 1950 remark that conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” During the 1950s and ’60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.” . . .

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid—life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?”

In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of “these people”—only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. . . .

In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters’ underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or “tea party” gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen. . . .

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety—including fear of change—whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. . . .

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant—they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking.

Where I part company with Dr. Alexander is in his statement that liberals are much worse than conservatives in this regard. That may well be true in his experience, but it isn’t in mine. Read more→

The Left on Sarah Palin: the tack changes yet again (updated)

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It’s interesting, watching liberals try to find some sort of caricature for Sarah Palin that will really stick. They’ve gone through several versions over the last year and a half, but while they’ve managed to give a lot of people a negative impression of her, they haven’t had anything like the sort of success they had in destroying George W. Bush’s public image, and she’s shown a disconcerting ability to blow their efforts away whenever she speaks in public or shows up on camera. That may be why the New York Times has elected to take a new tack: portraying Gov. Palin as a political mastermind.

It’s a remarkable tactical shift, as long as you don’t expect consistency or coherent argument. Ann Althouse, never one to suffer fools gladly (or at all, really), captured the NYT’s shift nicely: “Sarah Palin was a blithering idiot until she became a devious genius.” I feel a little sorry for the NYT, though—not much, but a little; they don’t understand Gov. Palin, because they really don’t understand this country as it exists beyond their elite bubble, and so they can’t predict what she’s going to do next because they don’t really know why she’s going to do it. As Mark Tapscott points out, her political influence and her strong core of support come from her ability to connect powerfully with the broad base of American voters who feel alienated from our government and the elite political class who control it.

That’s also, I believe, why elitist attempts to attack and dismiss Gov. Palin have had relatively little lasting effect; people who’ve only heard the elitist caricature tend to believe it, but that caricature tends not to survive comparison to the actual woman. In the end, if the Left is going to beat her, it’s going to have to do so the old-fashioned way: by accepting that she’s a respectable and serious opponent and trying to convince the voting public to choose an equally respectable and serious liberal candidate instead. The politics of personal destruction just aren’t going to work against her.

That possibility clearly worries our political and media elites—including the conservatives among them, many of whom it seems would rather lose to a liberal of their own class than help elect a conservative from the hoi polloi—because Gov. Palin is a powerfully gifted and effective politician who excels at retail politics, the kind of handshaking and baby-kissing that propelled Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate. They’re used to playing the game of politics by a certain set of rules, and she’s doing everything differently, and it seems to be working; that threatens everything they know. Andrew Malcolm, one of the very few truly indispensable political observers out there, sums it up well:

Fact is, love her or loathe her, Palin is doing everything wrong. Unless the game has changed.

That’s a possibility that should have our elites lying awake at night with cold sweats.

Update: Add the Huffington Post to the list, as Joan Williams declares,

Sarah Palin is playing chess. I don’t know what game the Administration is playing, but they just walked right into her carefully laid trap. Palin, the strategist, is amazing to watch. Her brilliance is her ability to tap in to the class conflicts that drive American politics these days. Obama, whom I have supported since Iowa, just doesn’t get it.

All the news that’s fit to—wait, what?

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Gregg Easterbrook, in his latest Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com (which includes, by the way, the best analysis I’ve seen of why New Orleans won the Super Bowl and Indianapolis lost), has this entertaining collection of corrections from the New York Times:

In the past six months, the Times has, according to its own corrections page, said Arizona borders Wisconsin; confused 12.7-millimeter rifle ammunition with 12.7 caliber (the latter would be a sizeable naval cannon); said a pot of ratatouille should contain 25 cloves of garlic (two tablespoons will do nicely); on at least five occasions, confused a million with a billion (note to the reporters responsible—there are jobs waiting for you at the House Ways and Means Committee); understated the national debt by $4.2 trillion (note to the reporter responsible—there’s a job waiting for you at the Office of Management and Budget); confused $1 billion with $1 trillion (note to the reporter responsible—would you like to be CEO of AIG?); admitted numerical flaws in a story “about the ability of nonsense to sharpen the mind;” used “idiomatic deficiency” as an engineering term (correct was “adiabatic efficiency”); said Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride occurred in 1776 (it was in 1775—by 1776, everybody knew the British were coming); “misstated the status of the United States in 1783—it was a country, not a collection of colonies” (dear Times, please Google “Declaration of Independence”).

The Times also “misidentified the song Pink was singing while suspended on a sling-like trapeze;” confused the past 130 years with the entire 4.5 billion-year history of Earth (see appended correction here); misused statistics in the course of an article complaining that public school standards aren’t high enough (see appended correction here); said Citigroup handed its executives $11 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses, when the actual amount was $1.1 billion (in the Citigroup executive suite, being off by a mere two zeroes would be considered incredible financial acumen); said a column lauding actress Terri White “overstated her professional achievements, based on information provided by Ms. White;” identified a woman as a man (it’s so hard to tell these days); reported men landed on Mars in the 1970s (“there was in fact no Mars mission,” the Times primly corrected).

The Times also gave compass coordinates that placed Manhattan in the South Pacific Ocean near the coastline of Chile (see appended correction here); said you need eight ladies dancing to enact the famous Christmas song when nine are needed; said Iraq is majority Sunni, though the majority there is Shiite (hey, we invaded Iraq without the CIA knowing this kind of thing); got the wrong name for a dog that lives near President Obama’s house (“An article about the sale of a house next door to President Obama’s home in Chicago misstated the name of a dog that lives there. She is Rosie, not Roxy”—did Rosie’s agent complain?); elaborately apologized in an “editor’s note,” a higher-level confession than a standard correction, for printing “outdated” information about the health of a wealthy woman’s Lhasa apso; incorrectly described an intelligence report about whether the North Korean military is using Twitter; called Tandil, Argentina, home of Juan Martín del Potro, a “tiny village” (its population is 110,000); inflicted upon unsuspecting readers a web of imprecision about the Frisians, the Hapsburg Empire, the geographic extent of terps, and whether Friesland was “autonomous and proud” throughout the Middle Ages or merely until 1500; inexactly characterized a nuance of a position taken by the French Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (philosophy majors must have marched in the streets of Paris over this); confused coal with methane (don’t make that mistake in a mine shaft!); on at least three occasions, published a correction of a correction; “misstated the year of the Plymouth Barracuda on which a model dressed as a mermaid was posed;” “mischaracterized the date when New York City first hired a bicycle consultant” and “misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx.”

Here, TMQ’s pal Michael Kinsley duns the fastidiousness of Times corrections. Kinsley’s column complaining about facts contains—you knew this was coming!—a factual error. Mike says the really big hunk of rock in southern Alaska is Mount McKinley on U.S. government maps, though commonly referred to by Alaskans as “Mount Denali.” Actually, it is commonly referred to by Alaskans as Denali, which means “Great Mountain” in Athabaskan. “Mount Denali” would mean “Mount Great Mountain.”

Granted, everyone makes mistakes, this is over a period of six months, and many of them are trivial (though some are ludicrously huge); still, I’m amused.

Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints

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Living in Indiana, surrounded by fans of a truly classy franchise, I couldn’t and didn’t root against the Colts; but I couldn’t bring myself to root against the Saints, either, and I’m very happy for their fans. They really had this one coming; if there’s any fanbase that’s had to put up with more garbage than Seattle fans, it’s New Orleans fans.

This all brings to mind Daniel Henninger’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal on American Needle Inc. v. National Football League, a case currently before the Supreme Court:

Most people would rather be a happy fan than anything else. Otherwise, there would not be so many fans for so many sports all over the world. This is irrefutable.

A friend recently emailed me that he didn’t think there was any such thing as a truly happy progressive. This is false. If an American progressive’s baseball team wins the Word Series, he is happy, if only briefly. A former colleague, a cricket fan, used to seek out late-night TV broadcasts in obscure bars in Queens, N.Y. It made him very happy.

Long ago, then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle figured out this greatest of all human truths, that the only value most people have in common, other than life itself, is the desire for a competitive home team. Family members who would sink a dinner fork into each other over Barack Obama’s health-care plan will do high fives in the living room later if the Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Rozelle got the league’s teams to distribute TV-broadcast revenue equally, so that no team would be permanently in the dumpster. Basketball and hockey did the same thing. Baseball has not, and it is well established that Chicago Cubs fans do not believe happiness exists.

Created Male and Female

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(Genesis 1:26-27, 2:21-25; Ephesians 5:28-32)

To put it politely, our society is deeply conflicted about men and women. You can see it in the debates that rage about the definition and significance of marriage; in the insistence of many feminists that the only difference between the sexes is a nearly-irrelevant matter of physical structure; in the increasingly hyper-sexualized character of our popular culture—you see things in ads these days that would have had to hide in a brown bag when I was a kid, and I’m not that old—and in a number of other ways. We see it a lot in our politics, especially in the treatment dished out recently to prominent female politicians by those who otherwise would proclaim themselves feminists and advocates of women’s equality. The agendas of our culture collide with each other, and with our own individual selfish agendas, and they all swirl around the unyielding rock of our intuition that somehow, despite what we may want to believe, men and women are different in ways that matter, that challenge how we behave and how we live.

This chaos creates terrible confusion in our culture, particularly for those whose lives are unsettled in other ways as well, because whatever some might argue, being male or female is fundamental to who each of us is as a human being. Genesis speaks powerfully into that chaos, blowing away the confusion and helping us to see ourselves more clearly. The key statement here is that God created humanity, male and female, in his image. That’s a loaded phrase—I could preach a month of sermons on it—but this morning, I just want to draw out two key points: first, this affirms that men and women are different, and second, it affirms the equality of men and women before God.

Let’s take the second point first. You might be expecting me to say that men and women are equal because both are made in the image of God, but that’s not exactly the point. You see, what Genesis tells us is that humanity as a whole was made in the image of God; the only individual human being declared by Scripture to be the image of God was Jesus Christ. As individuals, we all bear the image of God, and many if not all of the qualities that go with it; we are rational beings, we have at least some degree of free will, we speak and create in imitation of the one who spoke the word and created us, we exist in relationships with one another, and so on; but it’s collectively, as a race, as men and women together, that we are made in the image of God and charged with the great responsibility that entails, to care for the natural world and for the people around us.

It’s important to note here that there’s no emphasis on the male in Genesis 1; male and female are jointly created in the image of God, equal sharers both in all the gifts and abilities that implies and in all the responsibilities it carries with it. That changes in Genesis 2, of course, which lays out the fact that the man was created first and the woman was created out of him to be his helper; from this, many Christians whom I greatly respect argue that hierarchy between men and women is part of God’s intent for creation. For my part, though, I’m struck by the fact that sixteen of the nineteen times this word “helper” occurs in the Old Testament, it’s applied to God. I could certainly be wrong, but I don’t see any sign of planned subservience in God’s original design for creation. Rather, I tend to agree with the great Puritan commentator Matthew Henry, who observed that the woman is “not made out of his head to top him, not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him.”

At the same time, it’s clear from Genesis that men and women are different—women aren’t just men with a few different organs; if that were the case, it wouldn’t have been necessary for God to create both men and women. It wasn’t good for the man to be alone, but if the man were sufficient in himself to bear God’s image, then God could simply have made another man; they would have kept each other company just fine. But the man wasn’t sufficient—it’s as male and female, in that joining of differences, that we are made in the image of God. Does that mean that the creation of the woman was planned from the beginning? Yes. God already knew that the man would need the woman; it’s just that the man, being male, needed to figure that out for himself before he’d believe it. The time of men griping about women would come soon enough, but God made sure that at least the first man would get off on the right foot.

You see, when we say that God made humanity in his image, one aspect of that must be that we are relational beings—that his image is seen when we relate to one another in love, and when we work together to care for his creation—because that’s part of what it means to represent God; our ability to love one another and to live together in love reflects the love relationships between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Of course, when our relationships are broken, when they’re unloving, impure, or otherwise contrary to God’s will, then they don’t reflect him very well, but that’s all of a piece with our sinfulness; and even then, it remains true that we are only able to relate to one another as we do because we are made in God’s image.

This is truest in marriage, which God instituted with the first human couple. The God who is by nature in relationship among themself created humanity in his image, male and female, in order that they might be united in marriage—a point underscored, incidentally, by the man’s declaration, “This now is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman has argued that this is a covenant formula, a pledge of permanent and undying loyalty and commitment; we might describe this as the first man’s wedding vows, but that isn’t strong enough, because the first readers of this text took covenant a good deal more seriously than we do. Unlike our covenant ceremonies—mostly weddings—theirs included pledges and promises along the lines of, “May I be cut to pieces if I violate this covenant.” Nowadays, we try to make breaking a covenant as painless as possible, but that wasn’t God’s idea at all.

God takes covenants, including marriage, very seriously. That’s why verse 24 offers the comment, “It is for this reason that a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh”; the word translated “leave” there is often translated “forsake,” and is used elsewhere to describe Israel’s rejection of their covenant obligations to the Lord. It’s a loaded word, and the point of using it here is clear: the new husband is to set aside loyalty to parents in favor of this new loyalty, this new covenant, with his wife. In a patriarchal culture like that of Israel, in which loyalty to parents was one’s most important obligation, the statement that loyalty to one’s wife—or, reciprocally, to one’s husband—was to come first was a powerful one indeed.

What’s more, it had a powerful reason behind it, even if Israel probably didn’t get the point. For those whom God calls into marriage, it’s important to understand that marriage isn’t about personal fulfillment—that’s a benefit of marriage, not its purpose. Its twofold purpose is to be found here: first, to fulfill the command to be fruitful and multiply; and second, to display the image of God. In the union of man and woman in marriage, united in relationship, potentially to have children as God wills, and especially as they seek to follow God together, we see the image of God as we cannot see it anywhere else. God created us male and female in his image; in marriage male and female are united in a relationship of love, offering us an image of God who is love, for he exists in relationship among himselves, in the love that flows between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In marriage we can see the inner reality of God mirrored in a way that nothing else can show us; this, too, is part of the purpose for which he has ordained marriage.

As such, we as Christians should take marriage very seriously. Our society really doesn’t, unfortunately, and that affects all of our thinking and attitudes to some degree, whether we realize it or not; and we need to work against that in whatever way we can. For those of us who are married, that task begins in our own marriages; for those who aren’t but would like to be, it means keeping this in mind in your dating relationships; and it also means that all of us, even the most utterly single, need to take the marriages of those around us, and especially our family, church family, and other friends, very seriously as well. We need to do everything we can to help others build and nurture strong, healthy marriages that truly embody and reflect the selfless and self-sacrificial love of God; this is part of being faithful to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, and one of the ways in which we show the world his love for us.

Thought on gender and God language

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If all people, male and female, are made in the image of God—or rather, to put the matter correctly, if humanity collectively, including male and female together, is made in the image of God—then why does the Bible use male language and primarily (though not exclusively) male imagery for God? It’s a fair question, and there are reasons for it—none of which is that God is male. That one is yet another self-interested idolatrous distortion of the biblical text (which, like most such, eventually came back around to bite the folks who pushed it, or at least their heirs).

Indeed, it should be stated quite clearly that the use of masculine pronouns does not mean and is not intended to mean that God is male. That particular confusion doesn’t belong to the original Hebrew but is a product of our largely degendered English language; in Hebrew, which is like every other ancient language in that every word has a gender, where the words “wind” and “brick” and “meat” are all feminine while the words “cook” and “valley” and “mouse” are masculine—where the word “king” is of course masculine, but the word “kingdom” is feminine—the fact that the words for “God” are masculine wouldn’t necessarily be taken as limiting God by gender. To the best of my knowledge, that false interpretation is much more recent than the Hebrew Scriptures.

It’s not enough, though, to say that this is merely grammatical; there were in fact theological reasons for using masculine language for God—and no, they didn’t have anything to do with any sort of supposed male superiority. Rather, they had to do with differentiating the worship of Yahweh God of Israel from the religions of the surrounding nations.

For one thing, in those religions, as in their modern descendants, where a goddess was worshiped as creator, the process of creation was envisioned as the goddess giving birth to the world—meaning the world is made of the same stuff as the deity, and thus is partly divine itself. Genesis rules that out: God speaks, and creation happens, outside himself—he is Father of creation, not its mother. For another, as anyone who has read The DaVinci Code knows, goddess-worship among Israel’s neighbors involved ritual sex, as it also usually does today; this is nothing God would ever tolerate among his people, and especially not in the form it took then, where the temples basically had female slaves to serve as sacred prostitutes.

In both these respects, the relationship between God and his creation—and consequently, the worship he desires from his creation—differs dramatically from the pagan conception; and so there is the need for different language to portray that, to limn a different picture of that relationship than the one the pagans held. The purpose of masculine God-language isn’t to define or delimit our picture of God; it is, like most biblical language about God, more illustrative and suggestive than definitive. But it is also, like all biblical language, the language God has chosen, because the boundaries it sets are necessary.

Rahm Emanuel and the limits of apology

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Rahm Emanuel is the latest proof that apologizing is not the same thing as actually being sorry.  Of course, he’s proved that before, since he wields his tongue with all the finesse and remorse of Conan with his sword.  Here’s Gov. Palin’s Facebook note on Emanuel’s latest verbal fusillade:

The newly-released mind-boggling, record-smashing $3,400,000,000,000 federal budget invites plenty of opportunity to debate the merits of incurring more and more debt that will drown the next generation of Americans. Never has it been possible to spend your way out of debt. So . . . let the debate begin.

Included in the debate process will be opportunities for our president to deliberate internally the wisdom of this debt explosion, along with other economic, military and social issues facing our country. Our president will discuss these important issues with Democrat leaders and those within his inner circle. I would ask the president to show decency in this process by eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm’s continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts. Yes, Rahm is known for his caustic, crude references about those with whom he disagrees, but his recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.

The Obama Administration’s Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, “F—ing retarded,” according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Just as we’d be appalled if any public figure of Rahm’s stature ever used the “N-word” or other such inappropriate language, Rahm’s slur on all God’s children with cognitive and developmental disabilities—and the people who love them—is unacceptable, and it’s heartbreaking.

A patriot in North Andover, Massachusetts, notified me of Rahm’s “retarded” slam. I join this gentleman, who is the father of a beautiful child born with Down Syndrome, in asking why the Special Olympics, National Down Syndrome Society and other groups condemning Rahm’s degrading scolding have been completely ignored by the White House. No comment from his boss, the president?

As my friend in North Andover says, “This isn’t about politics; it’s about decency. I am not speaking as a political figure but as a parent and as an everyday American wanting my child to grow up in a country free from mindless prejudice and discrimination, free from gratuitous insults of people who are ostensibly smart enough to know better . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Mr. President, you can do better, and our country deserves better.

—Sarah Palin

Of course, we’ve heard something like this before from this administration, as the President compared his bowling to the Special Olympics (on national TV, no less); he made a couple apologies and left it behind him. Now, it appears, he’s hoping his administration will be able to do the same again. I have to say, that doesn’t sound to me at all like “Rahm blinking,” it sounds to me like Rahm Emanuel—and Barack Obama!—trying to pass the whole thing off with a pro forma apology that he didn’t even have to make in person. It’s nothing more than the political equivalent of cheap grace, cost-free pseudo-repentance, and it’s just not good enough.

It’s especially not good enough considering that were the shoe on the other foot, were this a club Rahm Emanuel could use against a political rival, he wouldn’t rest until the last shovelful of dirt had been thrown on that rival’s political career. Should he be fired? That would seem to me to be out of proportion to the moral offense—though the political offense here, causing further problems for an administration that’s already struggling when to this point he’s been largely ineffective at pushing his boss’s agenda, might be enough to start the deathwatch—but either COS Emanuel or President Obama needs to do something more here than merely make an empty gesture. It’s not enough to say, “Tim Shriver forgave us,” as if that should settle it; if they want real forgiveness, they need to demonstrate real repentance, of the sort that actually costs something. After all, as I wrote after the President’s Special Olympics wisecrack,

Michael Kinsley somewhere defined a gaffe as “what happens when the spin breaks down.” It’s a wry observation that captures a real truth about why gaffes matter: because they reveal something about a given politician that said politician doesn’t want us to see. They’re the places where the mask slips. That may not always be true, and the real meaning of a particular gaffe may not always be the one that first comes to mind, but in general, these are meaningful moments that tell us more about our politicians than our politicians will usually tell us about themselves.

What makes repentance? A change of heart. And at this point, it seems clear that a change of heart is exactly what’s needed here.

Song of the Week II

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I posted Greg Scheer’s “A Mark of Grace” earlier because I admire what he accomplished in that song, but it’s far from the only new song I learned at the Worship Symposium last week; there were several, of which my favorite is this one, which is still stuck fast in my head from last Thursday morning:

Creation Sings

Creation sings the Father’s song;
He calls the sun to wake the dawn
And run the course of day
Till evening falls in crimson rays.
His fingerprints in flakes of snow,
His breath upon this spinning globe,
He charts the eagle’s flight;
Commands the newborn baby’s cry.

Chorus:
Hallelujah! Let all creation stand and sing,
“Hallelujah!” Fill the earth with songs of worship;
Tell the wonders of creation’s King.

Creation gazed upon His face;
The ageless One in time’s embrace
Unveiled the Father’s plan
Of reconciling God and man.
A second Adam walked the earth,
Whose blameless life would break the curse,
Whose death would set us free
To live with Him eternally.

Chorus

Creation longs for His return,
When Christ shall reign upon the earth;
The bitter wars that rage
Are birth pains of a coming age.
When He renews the land and sky,
All heav’n will sing and earth reply
With one resplendent theme: The glories of our God and King!

Chorus

Words and music: Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, and Stuart Townend
© 2008 Thankyou Music
Recorded on the album Awaken the Dawn, by Keith and Kristyn Getty

Doing what comes naturally

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It is the most natural thing in the world to falsify God. All we have to do is follow our intuitions and good intentions. But whenever our uncrucified selves take over, bad things start happening. Worshiping Christ alone is an adjustment. It is unnatural—and freeing.

We pay a price to follow Christ. We pay a far higher price not to follow Christ.

—Ray Ortlund