Rabe Ramblings

The End Of An Era

2011-12-08T16:28:00.002-05:00

Nothing has drawn me out of hiding to post here in over a year, including even the 2011 World Series, which was the most enjoyable sports moment of my life. But today I feel the need to write something down. My one post for 2011:

I feel an ache in my gut today. I know that I shouldn’t. I know it’s silly, but there it is, gnawing at me.

For some reason, I keep recalling the scene in the classic football film “North Dallas Forty,” where a player at the end of his rope rails at the team’s duplicitous head coach. “Every time I call it a game, you call it a business. And every time I call it a business, you call it a game."

Professional sports are a business. But they’re dressed up to look like a game. As a result, to paraphrase the late Bart Giamiatti, they’re designed to break your heart.

We fans allow ourselves to harbor the illusion that they’re not a business. We imagine a connection between us and our team. We allow ourselves the conceit that the players are out there on our behalf, fighting for us, championing our city. Deep down, we know that it’s not really true. Every year brings us more evidence that it’s not. But still we think maybe…possibly…once in a blue moon…we might find one who shows us there is something more important, more lasting. We get sentimental over a business. And as the Corleone family taught us, you can never get sentimental over business.

I wanted to think that somehow Albert Pujols and the Cardinals were exceptions to that inviolable rule. This situation seemed different; special. Albert Pujols was not just some carpetbagger. He wasn’t some guy who lived in a hotel and wore the uniform. He and his family lived in St. Louis, had taken to the city, had become woven into its DNA. They operated a charity there, did good deeds for the city, and said all the right things to sooth the Gateway City’s perpetual inferiority complex. Here was an athlete that was destined to be one of the greatest players of all time--and he understood and loved St. Louis and the history of the Cardinals. Surely, someone like that wouldn’t leave. Surely the Cardinals wouldn’t allow someone like that to leave.

But this morning it happened. The Los Angeles Angeles of Anaheim swooped in with a ten-year, $255 million offer, and the Cardinals opted not to match it. Just like that, the soul of a city, the heart of a team that had just won the World Series, the marriage between one of the game’s greatest teams and one of its greatest players, were torn apart.

What stings for me is not the fact that Albert’s bat will no longer be in the Cardinals’ lineup. His ability will be difficult to replace—but not impossible. He’ll be 32 years old next month and his production has already started the steady decline you expect to see at that age.

What stings is that the history this city, this team, and this player were going to share is now lost forever. The sentimental future that was supposed to unfold will now never be. We were supposed to see El Hombre wearing those birds on the bat when he hit home run number 500, home run number 600, hit number 3000. There was supposed to be an Albert Pujols statue out in front of Busch Stadium, next to the one of Stan Musial--the other greatest Cardinal of all time. My son was supposed to stand at that statue and tell his son that he grew up watching Albert Pujols play baseball, just as my dad and grandpa stood there and told me about Stan the Man. A retired Albert was supposed to stand next to a Hall of Fame plaque depicting him in the familiar STL cap. Fifteen years from now he was supposed to stand out there on the field before World Series games wearing his red jacket alongside Bob Gibson and Lou Brock and Ozzie Smith, the living face of the National League’s greatest franchise.

And now none of that is going to happen.

What has already been accomplished remains. Albert Pujols put up the best 11 seasons of anyone playing in my lifetime, and he did it in a Cardinal uniform. He powered the team to three pennants and two World Series championships, the last of which was the greatest sports experience of my life. He provided me and my son with some of the greatest sports memories we will ever have. I don’t have any anger toward Albert, or toward the Cardinals, for that matter. I wish Albert well, and I know the Cardinals will be fine.

But this could’ve been something different. Something historic. Something that defines a person, a team, and a city. You can’t get that back. It’s gone with the stroke of a pen. What remains is merely the business of baseball. The ordinary. Business as usual. The memory of a few moments of shared success before each side moved on to the next opportunity.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I feel heartbroken today. That’s what happens when you get sentimental about a business.

For Whom The Ball Bounces

2010-08-03T11:12:00.003-04:00

Just when you think it can't be done any more perfectly, just when you go and name your list of people who are improbably still alive "Fess Parker Memorial" list (after he who, after dying a few months ago, left the entire world asking the question, "Wait. Fess Parker was still alive?"), just when you make the assumption that nobody could possibly better embody the ethos of that list, something like this happens:

Mitch Miller, record executive and 'Sing Along' host, dies at 99

I'm 41, and I (to the extent I ever thought about him) assumed that Mitch Miller had probably died sometime right around when I was born. Instead, he kicked it yesterday at 99.

I hate to be so fickle, but there's no way I can stand by my previous decision in light of this. Therefore, the I Can't Believe They're Still Alive list shall henceforth be known as the Mitch Miller Memorial "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive List." Unless I find out next week that Sergeant Schultz has just died or something.

Admit It: You Thought Of Me

2010-05-27T11:52:00.002-04:00

More and more, when some old famous person that nobody realized was still alive dies, I get people saying to me, "I thought of you when I heard."

So, c'mon, 'fess up. When you heard that Art Linkletter died yesterday, did you think of me? You know you did.

The updated Fess Parker Memorial "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list:

Doris Day

Harry Morgan

James Arness

Conrad Bain

Jack LaLanne

Rose Marie

Al Molinaro

Barbara Billingsley

Larry Storch

Jane Russell

~~Art Linkletter~~

Don Pardo (still working at Saturday Night Live, no less!)

Sid Caesar

Jayne Meadows

Charlotte Rae

Kirk Douglas

Requiescat In Pace

2010-05-25T09:58:00.004-04:00

I see that Paul Gray, bassist for the death metal band Slipknot has died.

That's too bad. He looked like a nice guy.

Odds And Ends

2010-05-18T17:09:00.007-04:00

Now a good couple of years into my 40's, I do not find evidence for my rapidly advancing age wanting. As I often tell people, it's as if around the age of 33 someone hit "fast-forward" on the tape player of my life. If asked when something occurred, I've now learned to fully double every time estimate that pops into my head. If I would guess something happened a year ago, it was two years ago. If I'd guess two, it was four.

More evidence of age accrued over the weekend. I finally got around to showing my teenage kids the movie Back to the Future. I remember greatly enjoying it when it came out, but I avoided showing it to my kids when they were younger because I recalled a fair degree of profanity and a bit of suggestiveness. Anyway, early in the film, Doc Brown, as he explains to Marty that he's built a working time machine, announces that he's planning to travel 25 years into the future. And a horrific thought occurred to me: that's now. The film takes place (and was released) in 1985. That far-away, unimaginable future is now here. And Crispin Glover's still weird.

Something rather unusual happened to my friend and co-worker Jerry Newcombe this week. About four years ago, Jerry co-wrote a humongous, 1200-page book with Peter Lillback of Westminster Seminary called George Washington's Sacred Fire. It's a comprehensive examination of Washington's religious beliefs. Yesterday morning, that book stood at number 479,955 on Amazon’s book sales rankings. Then Glenn Beck mentioned it on his radio and TV programs and urged everyone to buy it.

Today at Amazon, Jerry's book (as of this hour) sits at number 2.

Of every book on Amazon.

Apparently, that's the power of Glenn Beck. I can see now why leftists of every stripe soil their drawers over him.

I'm playing fantasy baseball again this year. Today, Andre Eithier, my best player, joined Asdrubal Cabrerra (broke his arm last night), Curtis Granderson (the always entertaining "groin injury"), and Jorge De La Rosa on the disabled list. Instead of dragging it out over a period of days, maybe it would be quicker and less painful if my entire team just ran out in front of a bus.

Oh yeah, and I also have Jonathan Papelbon, who was on the mound during last night's already-legendary collapse against the Yankees. Thanks for the 54.00 ERA, big J.

UPDATE: Beck had Pete Lillback, Sacred Fire's co-author, on his TV show last night. This morning (as of 10:24am Wednesday morning) it's number one at Amazon.

UPDATE #2: The book is still Number 1 today at Amazon. But they're out of them. The books are in stock here, however, and ready for order.

Sorry, Charlie

2010-04-08T15:28:00.004-04:00

Since I know you've been dying for me to acknowledge it (get it? Dying for me to acknowledge it? I kill me.), despite being caught up in Butler's NCAA title bid, it did cross my radar that John Forsythe passed on the other day, and thus passed off of my rapidly dwindling Fess Parker Memorial "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list.

The updated list:

Doris Day

Harry Morgan

James Arness

Conrad Bain

Jack LaLanne

~~John Forsythe~~

Rose Marie

Al Molinaro

Barbara Billingsley

Larry Storch

Because the list is getting so small, I feel it's time to add some new names, since there are still lots of people that you'd never guess are still alive. So, please also welcome:

Jane Russell

Art Linkletter

Don Pardo (still working at Saturday Night Live, no less!)

Sid Caesar

Jayne Meadows

Charlotte Rae

Kirk Douglas

Michael Douglas (Okay, I'm kidding about this one. But have you looked at him lately?)

One Shining Moment

2010-04-05T11:51:00.005-04:00

In light of Butler's appearance in tonight's NCAA Championship game (a sentence I cannot believe even as I write it), I thought it would be appropriate to adapt and revise some thoughts I posted here two years ago when the Bulldogs were on a Sweet 16 run and my former Butler classmate Thad Matta was about to coach Ohio State to the Final Four.

In 1987, I left home for Butler University in Indianapolis for my freshman year of college. They had an excellent broadcasting program (which was my interest), and a beautiful, semi-urban campus. It was not, however, a pleasant year. Living in the Ross Hall dormitory, I did my best to dive in and become a Hoosier. The soundtrack for that year was Seymour, Indiana native John Couger Mellencamp's new album The Lonesome Jubilee. I read Season on the Brink and began watching Bobby Knight on television wherever I could find him (since, in addition to Butler, which was small potatoes, you had to pick one of the state's real teams to root for: either IU, Purdue, or perhaps Notre Dame). I took visiting friends and family to the Indianapolis Speedway. The memories now are mostly fond, but for some reason at the time, it didn't take. I liked city, I liked the school, I liked the people, and I've maintained the Mellencamp and Knight devotion up to the present, but...I think I just wasn't ready to be out on my own yet. I was homesick and lonely, and wound up transferring as a sophomore to the University of Missouri-Columbia where I already had lots of old friends from high school (thus beginning my attendance at what became a truly breathtaking succession of colleges and universities).

During that difficult 87-88 school year, one of my lifelines was Butler Bulldog basketball. My roommate and I, and the two guys across the hall [I wish I'd kept up with all of them; they were good guys, and impossible to find now except one who I recently located on Facebook. My roommate's name then was Pete Smith. That should narrow it down to a few million...] had season tickets and went to every game, where we were part of an average crowd of about 500. It was so sparse at the games that we broadcasting majors could just stroll in and plop down courtside and "broadcast" the games into a tape recorder for practice if we wanted--no press pass or clearance necessary.

The Bulldogs played (and still play) in this incredible old-time field house where the championship scene of the movie "Hoosiers" was shot the year before I got there. To this day, it's the greatest place I've ever watched a basketball game. When the team wasn't using it for a game or practice, we'd sometimes play late-afternoon pickup games right on that court; it was open to everybody.

The season I was there, I think Butler finished something like 14-14 playing teams like Wabash, Valparaiso, and Indiana State. I remember one night watching ESPN with my friends (our dorm had just been wired for cable) and getting really excited that they actually mentioned the score for the game we'd just attended. It kind of felt like it might feel if you played ping pong in your basement one evening and later saw Dan Patrick give the score on the air.

Which is why I keep using the word "inconceivable" about this game, even cognizant of that term's potential misuse [thanks to The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."] The Butler Bulldogs are playing Duke for the national championship tonight. Of course, it's unlikely that they will win. Duke is a number one seed and a perennial powerhouse. 4,200-student Butler is the smallest school to reach the NCAA finals in 40 years. But stranger things have happened. Butler's already knocked one top seed out of the tourney, and you don't get to the NCAA finals by merely being lucky. This is a legitimate championship contender. Just the notion of Butler playing in the biggest game of the Big Dance is beyond anything I would have ever let myself imagine.

As recently as a few months ago, whenever my time at Butler would come up in conversation, the usual response was, "Butler? Where's that at?" Whatever happens tonight, Butler will hereafter be a school that's been in the NCAA Final. Now, everybody knows where it's at.

Butler University Final Four, NCAA Tournament NCAA Championship Duke University Butler Bulldogs

Scroogy Christianity

2010-04-01T11:19:00.003-04:00

In our pampered, Western, American lives, rich with comfort and luxury, there is no question that Christians can (and often do) become lazy and complacent. Our concern for the lost and zeal for the glory of God can easily be eclipsed by a passion for keeping the car looking nice, staying up to date with the stuff recorded on the DVR, and planning the next vacation. Our hearts are, in the words of the great Reformer John Calvin, idol factories, producing God substitutes at an alarming rate. There is a fearful danger in this, and the sobering words of Jesus in the Bible should brace us: "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 7:21, ESV).

That said, there is an expanding species of glum Christian speaker/teacher/preacher/writer that has risen to prominence in the evangelical world mainly by scolding the faithful. These guys (and I won't name any of them for the moment, though I'm sure you know a few of whom I speak) are reputed to deliver "convicting," "challenging," and even "shocking" messages that specialize in taking the Christian conscience, smelting it into a makeshift pickax, and burying it in your forehead. Such messages ostensibly call Christians to put aside their complacency and be more devoted to Christ. In reality, they merely shoot fish in a barrel.

The kind of scold I have in mind can most easily be identified by his use of guilt. If he tweets, he'll tend to write things like, "1000 people died of starvation today. Hope you enjoyed 'American Idol' on TV." His Facebook statuses usually say things like, "Are you as upset about your neighbor going to Hell as about your NCAA tournament bracket?" If he has a bumper sticker, it's likely to say something like, "So much need, so few care."

If he preaches, he'll tend to load up his messages with ample illustrations of how you just don't care enough. One of this ilk, for instance, recently chastised his hearers for driving expensive cars while so many in the world are in need. It's an easy shot, and most likely amps up the requisite guilt in the hearers, but it's also may be facile nonsense, based on a whole host of unchallenged assumptions. Consider, for instance:

1). The preacher has no idea how much his hearers have also given to missions and charity. [In fact, studies show that the people in his usual evangelical audience are far more likely to have donated--and donated more--than any other group of people.]

2). He's assuming a Marxist, materialist view of the world--that somehow you having an expensive car here is causing something to be taken away from someone else in Guatemala.

3). He's misunderstanding the nature of the wealth to begin with--and coming close to spitting on God's blessing. The Bible assures us that there are dangers associated with wealth, to be sure. But we must also recognize that the material prosperity of the Western world is a direct result of Reformation Christianity, with it's traditional emphases on creativity, free exchange, hard work, and innovation. Are we supposed to apologize for living in a civilization that has reaped God's blessing for operating for much of its history in the way that He designed? Are we to feel guilty that God, who has appointed the time and place of our dwelling, put is in a culture that has benefited from centuries of (admittedly now-waning) Christian influence? Is a preacher who tries to "convict" you about having air conditioning spurring you to godliness, or just scoring a few cheap rhetorical points so you'll feel like something happened?

4). Furthermore, such preachers often fail to answer certain key questions all this should raise, such as, how much affluence is too much? Could you give me a dollar figure? And what about your car, Mr. Preacher? You live here too. You've declared a $100,000 Mercedes to be sinfully extravagant, but what about your $16,000 Ford Focus? How many people worldwide could be fed on $16,000? How much missions work could be done with the money you spent on that suit? In these situations, it's usually your life that's sinfully extravagant, while his just happens to be right at the God-approved level of frugality. The bottom line is that in America, you could always have given more than you did.

While many of the charges of the glum Christian guiltists are based on faulty, unexamined views of economics and motivation, there is also often a cracked theological foundation underlying the whole enterprise.

First, I suspect that the main driver behind such guilt-inducing appeals is a concern about nominal Christianity. And there, at least, the sourpuss killjoy has properly diagnosed a real problem. Our churches are filled with people who don't seem to behave any differently than the world. But while he gets the diagnosis right, the cause seems to elude him, and thus, so does the cure. Much of the nominal "easy-believism" filling churches today is the result of revivalistic evangelism, imported from the 19th century, which equates emotional, one-time professions of faith with actual conversion. Having been presented with a sub-gospel of "Jesus loves you and wants to live in you," it appears that many "Christians" produced by such appeals really do care more about their flat screen TVs and stock portfolios than they do about Jesus. But the answer to that problem isn't "do more!"--it's to repent and believe the gospel.

Another problem lurking a little further beneath the surface is an incipient dualism, also a product of the revivalism. As the downgrade in theology made its way through American evangelicalism during the 18th and 19th centuries (speeded along by many of the unbiblical and pragmatic practices we adopted), the Reformation emphasis on the cultural mandate was almost completely lost. In a robust, biblical, Reformed worldview, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. All things done to the glory of God in fulfillment of our God-given vocations ("callings") are spiritual, which is why Martin Luther once said that changing a diaper is as spiritual as preaching a sermon. Asked what he would do if he knew Jesus were returning tomorrow, Luther is said to have responded "I'd plant a tree." As revivalistic Christianity came to be more and more about "saving souls," and less about what Luther and the Reformers saw as the Kingdom of God, that which was non-material and churchy came to be seen as truly "spiritual." Evangelism, missions, and church activities came to be seen as "Kingdom work" while the mundane activities of life (i.e. the stuff we necessarily spend most of our days on, like our jobs, our families, our daily chores) came to be seen as worldly (if necessary) distractions. In this way of thinking, which absolutely saturates evangelicalism, only that which directly benefits missions and evangelism is of value. Thus, the "worldly person" is the one who goes to his plumbing job each day in order to feed his family and pay his mortgage. The best value he can hope his work will have is that he might get to share the gospel with someone while on the job, or make some money that can be contributed to missions and evangelism. Meanwhile, the truly "spiritual person" is the one floating above the ether, conveying concepts to minds, preferably working in full-time ministry, and making the plumbers feel guilty about spending 40 hours of their week at work. As a result, evangelical Christianity is a fruitful pasture for the work of the scolds. Most Christians already feel guilty about not doing enough "Kingdom" (i.e. church) work, and this kind of message punches them right in the solar plexus.

Now, to be clear, being more devoted to Christ is a good thing. It's a necessary thing. But that's precisely where my problem with these preachers gets its traction. We could always be more devoted to Christ. There are undoubtedly Christians who need to be shaken out of apathy. But guilt trips like this are too easy because of the basic fact of sin: all fall short of the glory of God. The bottom line in the message of the furrowed scolds is that you're not faithful enough.

Well guess what? You're right. I'm not faithful enough. I fall short of loving Jesus enough. Too often, I'm concerned about my own comfort. And you know something? All that is true of you too, Mr. Evangelist. It's called sin, and you're stuck with it just like I am. Every single one of us falls short in all of those areas. There has never been a single nanosecond where either of us has loved God with our whole heart, mind, and strength.

So now what? Rather than offering the cool refreshment promised by the Gospel, such preachers instead lay guilt upon guilt, chain upon chain, all the while drawing praise for their fearless, "convicting" message of condemnation. But guilt is easy, especially when dealing with a roomful of Christians. [Puffing yourself and some of your hearers us with notions of how much more you care than everyone else is a real danger here as well. You can often spot an immature Christian who has just sat through such a message by his insufferable sanctimony.] A Christian with a properly working conscience will always feel the weight of her own failures in such a message.

Of course, there is a place for a strong message of conviction and repentance, and many of the people who dabble in this kind of guilt-tripping generally have good ministries otherwise. There are those who occasionally take an easy shot at Christians without being characterized by it. But getting Christians to figuratively tear their robes in anguish is just an easy stage trick, like getting the audience to gasp while you appear to be sawing the lady in half. Preaching the gospel is hard. God justifies lazy people? God justifies those who don't love their neighbor as themselves? God justifies people who are sinfully preoccupied with their own comfort? God justifies people who bought iPads with money that could have been given to Haitian missions? That's a message the self-righteous human spirit rebels at. That's scandalous.

And So It Is Done

2010-03-22T16:05:00.003-04:00

Not surprisingly, the craven Congress has passed the health care bill, meaning that in just a few short years, your health care will be in the safe hands of the people who revolutionized airport security in the wake of 9/11.

Much has already been said, but a few comments stand out. Perhaps most astute are those of the always-reliable Mark Steyn of National Review Online. The ramifications of this bill are hard to overstate:

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It's a huge transformative event in Americans' view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there's plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it's also unaffordable. That's why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it's less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we'll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America's enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

One does not have to be a fan of America's recent military adventurism to recognize that Canada, England, and most of the western European welfare states have been depending on a strong America for their own defense for decades. (Anyone seen a French fighter jet buzzing around lately?) I don't regret the end of the free ride for America's ostensible allies, but I do regret that America will soon be among the simpering, helpless giants depending on some other nation to defend us. (And who will that be? China?)

It has also become clear that, incredibly enough, we have an entire political party in America--indeed, one currently holding the majority--that is almost completely devoted to the killing of unborn children. Lest anyone think this is a partisan statement, let me be quick to add that Republicans, on the main, have been mediocre at best in defending human life. But as the Stupak debacle shows us, the "pro-life Democrat" is now a purely mythical creature. The fact is, as a national entity, the Democratic Party loves it some baby-killin'. Infanticide has become the party's sine qua non. And so we should not be entirely surprised to find God's judgment falling upon us.

Other civilizations have similarly been toppled at comparable points in their histories, and a nation whose sexual proclivities have driven us to require a blood sacrifice to the tune of 50 million human lives can only ask what took so long. Repentance is the only way out, and it takes a mighty strong faith to imagine such a thing having gone this far down the road.

Such repentance will need to begin with the Christians, who frequently look just like the world when it comes to such matters as sexuality and being the recipients of stolen goods via government redistribution programs. The LORD was willing to spare Sodom if just ten righteous men could be found there. Only when Christians, who ought to know better, stop bowing the knee to Baal will the Lord relent from treating us like Baal-worshipers. What we're seeing is Romans 1 in action, and it was promised long ago.

Obamacare health care Bart Stupak abortion

Who Knew?

2010-03-18T16:08:00.002-04:00

Fess Parker from "Daniel Boone" has died. To which I say, "Fess Parker was still alive?!?" No way anyone knew Fess Parker was still living.

Parker is so emblematic of the phenomenon captured in my oft-heralded "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive List" that I'm actually going to start calling it the Fess Parker Memorial "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list.

Sick About Health Care "Reform"

2010-02-25T09:52:00.003-05:00

As the health care summit/charade opens today in Washington, a few thoughts come to mind. First is the recognition of what's really happening here when you boil it all down. Undoubtedly, all the incredible minutia is confusing (a fact that the statists use to their advantage), but when all is said and done, it still funnels out to a few basic principles. What kind of country are we going to be?

For much of America's history, liberty was its primary value. Our Constitution set out a cherished set of negative rights: things the government could not do to us. Now, those rights are being stripped away one by one in favor of the newer, progressive notion of "positive rights"--those things that the government must do for me (which, as it turns out, is pretty much everything). Barack Obama has been unvarnished in his view on this. He (now famously) said in a 2001 radio interview:

The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society...[T]he Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf....I'm not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.

Well, he's found another way. In all the health care debate, know this: whatever else health care reform movement is about, it's about dramatically curtailing liberty.

The other day driving home from work, I was listening to a program on NPR ("where thousands work so that hundreds may listen"). I used to think the reason I arrived home cranky every day from my commute was because of the traffic and horrible South Florida drivers. Now I'm realizing it might be because of my "entertainment" choices. Anyway, this particular program (On Point with Tom Ashwood) was discussing health care, and as expected, they had a balanced panel: one proponent for universal health care from Princeton University, and one proponent for universal health care from the leftist Center for Media and Democracy.

Discussions like this happen all over the place every day, so it's not as if this were a sudden, isolated bolt of insight. I was just impressed by how clearly the matter was stated. It's bald Marxism ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his need")--and predictably on NPR, nobody flinched.

The guest was Uwe Reinhardt, who is a professor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The snippet begins at 15:25 of the program:

REINHARDT: The problem is that health care in America is very expensive. It's twice as much as it costs in Canada, per capita.

HOST: Mmm hmm.

REINHARDT: And some people, this lady who just called, are simply too poor to be able to afford health care for their families out of their own income, and they need help from their fellow citizens who have more money or who are healthier. And that's really the debate. To what extent do I have to...or should I be...my brother's and sister's keeper with health care in America? All other nations have solved this. They have said, "If I'm healthy, I should subsidize the sick. If I'm rich, I should subsizize the poor." Americans have not agreed. When Senator McConnell says the American people don't want this bill, I am not so sure. Because that lady who just called definitely wants this bill. [Chuckles]

HOST: Yeah.

REINHARDT: There are richer people who need to be asked to the cashier's window, uh, myself included, by the way. Uh, some rich people may not want this bill because they don't want to pay any more.

HOST: But do you think that the plan that went so far in the Senate and then ground to a halt, and now is kind of back, and that's the president's plan...would that control the costs that you're talking about, enough that even if we're sharing...uh...the burden, it would work out?

REINHARDT: Not in the short run. I have said...I've put it in writing...in the short run, say in the next five years, even the Pope couldn't do it. It is very difficult to control costs, because...I always joke and say there's Alfred E. Newmann's equation: every dollar health spending is someone's health care income, including fraud, waste, and abuse. So when you're talking in the business community, when they're talking cost control, they're really talking about controlling the income of doctors and hospitals and pharma and device manufacturers, so you have tremendously powerful lobbyists protecting the income of these providers. It'll take at least a ten year wrestling match between Congress and these, uh, interest groups before you can ever have costs under control...

Read that last section again. In order to get "health care reform," you'll have to get costs "under control." And in order to do that, the federal government will have to begin controlling personal incomes of people in 1/6th of the American economy. Reinhardt later enthusiastically affirmed that the current health care bill is a good first step toward putting us on this road.

And they will get us down that road. Looking over the landscape in the last few days has brought to mind just how pitifully ineffectual the Republican Party has been in opposing the statist, socialistic agenda over the past, oh, 50 years. With Obama's health care reform plan seemingly going down in flames at the time of Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts, Republican after Republican could be heard pathetically squeaking about how this was really about "getting a seat at the table" and "having our voices heard." They actually seem to consider it a victory when they can kick a field goal in the other guy's stadium, on the other guy's field, playing by the other guy's rules. By sitting down to "negotiate" the nuts and bolts of the health care bill, they've once again adopted the premise and are now simply sorting out the details.

In 1993 when Bill Clinton came to office, he floated a universal health care plan (Hillarycare) which got eaten alive. But liberals spent the next 16 years pushing the concept anyway. Now, Republicans are willing to have some give and take on it. In another 16 years, complete, universal, socialized health care in this country will be a fait accompli. The shills of the GOP long ago swallowed the statist hook. They've long since conceded the notion that government should be involved in most areas of American life. As a result, all that's left to argue about is how much it's going to cost.

The Democrats want massive government programs and entitlements to bankrupt us to the 13th generation; the Republican "opposition" only wants them to bankrupt us to the 10th. As always, we must reject the idolaters wherever we find them. Statists are idolaters, believing that the government is God and can provide for our every need. And that's true whether they have a D- or an R- next to their name.

health care reform NPR Tom Ashbrook Uwe Reinhardt Barack Obama

Haigiography

2010-02-23T15:35:00.003-05:00

Chris Hitchens does today to Al Haig what he usually does to high profile dead folks. While there's much truth in Hitchens' gleeful torching of the corpse--Haig was a notorious schemer and maneuverer even by Washington's standards--it seems to me that Haig ends up yet again wrongly pilloried for his most celebrated incident.

Everyone remembers (or has heard about) the sweaty, bug-eyed, out-of-breath Haig taking to the White House podium in the wake of the shooting of Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981, and uttering those now-infamous words:

Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of State in that order, and should the President decide he wants to transfer the helm to the Vice President, he will do so. He has not done that. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him.

The first problem with this, of course, is that it was factually incorrect. Haig, as Secretary of State, was actually fifth in line, constitutionally. After Vice President George H.W. Bush, constitutionally, there was the Speaker of the House (Tip O'Neill), President Pro Tempore of the Senate (Strom Thurmond), and then Haig.

Hitchens sums up the popular sentiment, hardened into history, about the episode:

...[T]his neurotic narcissist seized the microphone and made a clumsy attempt to seize power....nothing could equal that day's performance, which evinced all the sweaty, pasty-faced, trembling symptoms of a weak king or of a slobbering dauphin who could not wait to try on the crown.

Haig, without doubt, had his flaws, and power-hunger was among them. Still, I've always felt that he got a bad rap on this, and that--in context--he actually did the right thing.

What is almost always forgotten about the incident is what directly preceded it. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there was a great deal of confusion. It was not even known that Reagan had been hit for at least half an hour. White House press secretary James Brady had been gravely wounded. That left assistant press secretary Larry Speakes, who was back at the White House, to address reporters in the White House press room.

Vice President Bush was aboard Air Force Two, which was en route back to Washington from Texas. Understandably, with Reagan wounded and the VP in the air, the press asked who was in charge of the country. Speakes, giving one of the most disastrous press briefings in history, answered "I cannot answer that question at this time."

According to the reports of those who were there, Secretary of State Al Haig, the man in the administration charged with keeping the closest eye on the Soviet Union at one the highest-tension periods in the Cold War, watching the disaster unfold on television as Speakes essentially tells the world that nobody seems to be in charge for the moment, shoots out of his chair and bolts down to the press room. I've asked myself, "What would I have done if I were in Al Haig's shoes that day, as the highest ranking person in the White House?" The answer I always come back to is: I would've run downstairs and assured the world that the United States was not rudderless and asleep at the switch. I would've wanted to send the message that someone is in charge here.

Did he argue incorrectly from the Constitution? Yes. Would it have been better if he hadn't? Of course. But if Haig's concern at that moment was that the world see there was someone at the helm (as he maintained ever-after), then he did about the only responsible thing one could do. Read it again, with the context in mind. This is not someone trying to pull off a coup d'etat:

As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course. [Emphasis added]

Haig's press conference can be viewed in the last few minutes of this and continues into the first few minutes of this. (The second bit is interesting in that it is followed immediately by a discussion between Bernard Shaw and Daniel Schorr on the nascent Cable News Network. Schorr, who was about 85 even then, has always been a left wing kook even among journalists. He immediately goes after Haig on the constitutional misunderstanding, saying that "the alacrity with which he fills vacuums has been well-noted." One wonders if this is where the harshly negative casting of the incident in the "conventional wisdom" began?)

Much of the criticism of Haig's life and legacy is deserved. But in his most infamous moment, he was actually doing the right thing where history has immortalized him as doing the wrong thing.

Organic Moralism

2010-01-25T15:32:00.001-05:00

From Doug Wilson:

When it comes to food choices, I think catholic and eclectic is good -- live and let live, eat and let eat. What I can't abide is moralism about food. In the absence of any word from God on it, it would be wisdom on our part to keep quiet about what we see on the other fellow's fork. But we don't. We legislate for others, and make censorious faces at them. We launch crusades.

In short, a sexually guilty people have accepted as "normal" the most unnatural practices imaginable, and they have then demanded that their food be "all natural." Wisdom is vindicated by her children. This guilt-driven desire has resulted in an entire industry springing up that caters to the deep desire that a morally inferior people have to feel morally superior. That's hard to do, and so there's money to be made there if you pull it off. You have to pick something out at random, and then make people bad for deviating from the new arbitrary norm.

The "Told You So" Edition

2010-01-22T17:03:00.002-05:00

A couple of events that transpired this week demonstrated the profound, prescient, and...I don't know--I'm looking for one more "p" word here...pusillanimous?--former nature of this blog, back when I actually used to write it.

First, baby-faced congenital liar John Edwards finally admitted this week to being the father of his former mistress's baby. That should have come as a surprise to absolutely no sentient human being (except perhaps Mrs. Edwards), and should particularly not have been a surprise to any regular Rabe Rambling's visitors. On the day Edwards finally admitted the affair in 2008 (after the National Enquirer got the goods on him while the mainstream media determinedly looked the other way), he was quick to assure us that the baby was not--could not have been--his. I helped you understand that of course it was his baby, and that he was a huge liar:

Elizabeth Edwards' cancer reoccurred in March 2007. Assuming normal gestation, this child would have been conceived in May 2007. If that child belongs to John Edwards, he's the world's biggest cad, and as a politician he knows this. It's over for him. So he claims that the affair ended in 2006....But does that claim withstand even a moment's scrutiny? If the affair ended in 2006 as he claims...[w]hy was he photographed in his former mistress's hotel room holding some other guy's baby?

I also noticed this week that the liberal radio network Air America finally gave up the ghost--just as I said it would, and for the reasons I said it would--on the very day of its launch back in 2004:

The spectacular flop that will be "the liberal talk network" (known officially as Air America Radio) launched moments ago, in case you hadn't heard....you'll want to tune in quickly (if, that is, you happen to live near one of the five enlightened radio stations carrying this insightful commentary). Something tells me it might not be around for long.

Frankly, it's amazing that it was able to limp along for nearly six years. It was non-entertaining, unfunny, and just bad radio. It started bouncing checks only weeks after its debut, and seemed to be in near-constant bankruptcy proceedings. Don't worry, though--it's only a matter of time before media chuckleheads begin claiming that AA failed not because it was terrible radio run by business incompetents, but rather because its target audience was just too darned smart to listen to talk radio anyway.

I also obliquely predicted the death of Artie Lange last year, and while he is still alive, he did try to kill himself a few weeks ago. So I get at least partial credit for that.

Let the lesson be learned: I know stuff. If you wish to know what future months and years hold, just go back and read the archives. And Harry Morgan--I've got quite a track record, so you'd better be looking over your shoulder.

Air America John Edwards Artie Lange

Happy New Year!

2010-01-04T13:20:00.002-05:00

A few notes to start 2010 off on the right foot.

It shall henceforth be pronounced "twenty-ten," NOT "two-thousand ten." We had a bit of confusion during the first decade of the new millennium because of those double-zeros. It would have sounded strange to say, for instance, "it's twenty-oh-seven." So we got a bye for the first decade. But that's it. Nobody walks around saying, "I was born in one thousand, nine-hundred and sixty-eight." If we continued along our current pronunciation path, we'd be encumbering future generations with an awful burden. So, henceforth, we are adopting "twenty." Hey, that's the way it was in all the futuristic predictions anyway (e.g. "Why, by the year twenty-thirty seven, people will no longer have saliva but will instead have their food digested for them by specially built androids!") So twenty-ten it is. Your immediate assent and cooperation is appreciated.

Please, someone needs to stop Dick Clark. I liked the guy as much as anybody, but it has to stop. It's not getting better--it's getting worse. Retirement's not bad; he can spend the time counting his piles of money. I as much as anyone appreciate his apparent desire to refrain from inflicting the full measure of Ryan Seacrest on us for as long as possible, but things are getting embarrassing. Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing is that I was in front of the TV watching "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve" at midnight on December 31.

Since we were in front of the tube, though, I do appreciate ABC's consideration, as my kids got to see Jennifer Lopez in a see-through unitard (though I don't think that's actually why Dick Clark was drooling) and to hear the Black Eyed Peas tell us how bad they want us (ooh, ooh, ooh). Keep it classy, ABC.

For Christmas, I received a DVD copy of Collision, the documentary film chronicling series of debates and discussions between vehement atheist Christopher Hitchens and devout Christian Doug Wilson. I highly recommend it. It's thought-provoking and instructive as two of the best champions for their viewpoint slug it out. As in the Christianity Today exchanges that launched the film project, Hitchens repeatedly (and necessarily) avoids answering the question of where he finds the stringent moral standard he urges upon all of us in his writing. As Wilson points out, in the atheistic worldview, there is (as John Lennon famously sang) "above us only sky." Which means, above Auschwitz, only sky. Above Buchenwald, only sky. The bare universe doesn't care whether you help old ladies across the street or run over them, but Hitchens cannot bring himself to write as if this were really true. I recommend the film, and as far as I can tell, Hitchens is pleased with it too (having appeared on numerous programs to promote it after it was completed). It's something most modern "debates" are not: thoughtful.

Should "Global Warming" Be "Warmer"?

2009-11-20T12:32:00.005-05:00

According to an article in Der Spiegel (a name that always cracks me up, as does most of the German language in the post-war, Mel Brooks era), many climate scientists are "baffled" that the catastrophic global warming they've been hysterically predicting doesn't seem to be showing up in the actual...uh, how do we say?...temperatures.

Among the nuggets as stunned climatologists try to reconcile the data with their nonsense predictions:

The Earth's average temperatures have stopping climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Now, this is Der Spiegel's statement rather than that of one of the scientists, but read that statement over a couple of times. Surely there's a government entity involved here somewhere. Let me rephrase what that sentence appears to be saying: "Global warming stopped a long time ago. And this year, it looks like global warming might stop in its tracks!" I'll assume it's a problem in translating from the German.

Some more (entirely predictable) fun:

Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008, and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill.

And:

Despite their current findings, scientists agree that temperatures will continue to rise in the long term. The big question is: When will it start getting warmer again?

Yes, that is the big question. Because it's empirical science, you see? It has to start getting catastrophically warmer. Didn't you see An Inconvenient Truth?

Around The Horn

2009-11-10T12:28:00.003-05:00

Hey, 'dya forget about me? Sure you did. However, all is forgiven because it's November and that means it's time for another post! Some quick hits:

I see that Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano (still single as of this writing) is on the lookout for any potential anti-Muslim sentiment in the wake of the Ft. Hood massacre:
Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday's rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan
Here's kind of a crazy thought, but how about we start worrying about the frontlash? You know, where people are actually getting killed.

Recent deaths from Muslim extremists in U.S.:

--9/11: 3000 killed in hijacking attacks
--John Alan Muhammed: 16 shooting deaths
--Nidal Malik Hasan: 13 shooting deaths
--One daughter run over in Arizona
--Two daughters "honor-killed" in Texas
--Three shot, one killed in Arkansas recruiting office

Recent deaths from "anti-Muslim backlash":

--Still zero

Glad you're on the case, Janet.

Great to see Brett Hull inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame last night. I covered the "Golden Brett" in St. Louis for a few years in the early '90's, and though he had a reputation for sometimes being a bit cantankerous, I never found him to be anything other than great fun. I once handed him my then-infant (now 17-year-old) son John for a photograph. John began instantly crying, and Brett held him like he was a pillow full of smallpox. (We still have the picture in one of our photo albums.) "Get used to it," I told him. "Your time is coming." Within four years, Hull had three of them. (Children, not smallpox pillows.) Always honest, always a great quote, the best hockey scorer I've ever seen, and a smile that kept you from being offended when he called you a "puke" (which he called everybody). The Blues should have never let him go.

When I last posted, it seemed like the St. Louis Cardinals could be on their way to the World Series. I got a little busy...how'd that turn out, anyway?

As insane as he usually drives me (which is documented here, here, and here, among other places), it is good, proper, and right for the Cardinals to bring Tony La Russa back for another year. Is he an excruciating over-manager? Without doubt. Is he loyal to a fault? If it were up to him, Chris Duncan would still be playing left field and Juan Encarnacion demonstrating taking one-eyed at-bats. But I know this: the Cardinals have been a contender almost every year since La Russa got there. Don't mess with success. It will also be interesting to have Mark McGwire around next year. This needs to happen. The steroids thing is over; good heavens, Andy Pettite and A-Rod were having statues carved of them during this post-season. Big Mac needs to come back, talk about it, put it behind him, and go to the Hall of Fame where he belongs. Even in the juiced era, the guy left everyone else in awe. Time to move forward.

Speaking of the aforementioned John Allen Muhammed, he is scheduled to be executed tonight in Virginia. No word yet as to whether Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, or Danny Glover have chained themselves to the jailhouse yet. The events in Ft. Hood brought back to mind the coverage of the night that Muhammed was caught after his weeks-long terror spree in the D.C. area. The entire evening, the networks tried to avoid using his adopted (and legal) name "Muhammed" and instead kept calling him "John Allen Williams." And they scrambled to cite his Gulf War I experience, abuse as a child, and hatred for a spouse as possible motives for the shootings. CBS's Vince Gonzalez reported the next day, "About the same time he joined the army Muhammad converted to Islam, but authorities say religion was not a motive." Subsequent evidence proved definitively that the shootings were carried out as an act of jihad. Surprise! Keep that in mind as you watch the media's Ft. Hood coverage.

And that, ladies and gents, is how we play "Around the Horn." After my last post, I jokingly added, "Have a nice autumn." And here I am in November. So considering the way these postings are actually going, I'll refrain from saying, "Have a happy new year."

Janet Napolitano Nidal Malik Hasan Ft. Hood Radical Islam Brett Hull St. Louis Cardinals Tony La Russa Mark McGwire John Allen Muhammed

September Already?

2009-09-23T16:38:00.003-04:00

Hey, it's been a while. What're ya gonna do? Life gets busy sometimes. In the meantime, here are some interesting things I've been looking at today:

Salon.com has a fascinating, three-part profile of the early radio career of Glenn Beck. It's clear that the author is no fan (whereas I generally like Beck, though I preferred the Glenn-Beck-on-the-radio version of about three years ago to the Howard-Beale-Prophet-of-Doom that I see on Fox News). About the early, pre-Mormon Beck, virtually all seem agreed: he was not a good guy. For a radio geek like me, a story like this is like catnip.

Even the liberals over at Slate are starting to get a whiff of the unpleasant stench of nannystatism that is descending upon the land. They take a look at a draconian paper in the New England Journal of Medicine advocating taxes even on diet soda--because it may cause you more in your heart to want real sweets. After all, since we're going to put health care under state control, the state now has a direct interest in your eating habits. Slate notes:
If you're trying to sink health care reform, this is a good way to do it: Show everyone how subsidized health insurance will entitle other people to regulate your eating habits.

Like the previous article, TIME's Joel Stein points out that liberals have just as tenuous relationship with science as they're always claiming conservatives do. Talking about the resistance to getting vaccinated for swine flu among his circle of friends, he says:
while the far right gets a lot of crap about not believing in science, the left isn't crazy about it either. Only instead of rejecting facts that conflict with the Bible, it ignores anything that conflicts with hippie myths about the perfection of nature. That's why my neighborhood is full of places you can go to detoxify with colonics, get healed with crystals and magnets and buy non--genetically engineered food.
Unfortunately, however, Stein's answer to the problem leaves him in no better a spot:
When presented with doubts, I don't search for detailed information from my side. I go with the consensus of mainstream media, academia and the government. Not because they're always right but because they're right far more often than not, and I have a TiVo to watch.
And just when he was so close to making sense.

On Bruce Springsteen's 60th birthday (a fact that just makes me want to crawl into a hole somewhere), here's a cool piece about the birth of Born to Run.

And here's a note about an, ahem, awesome television program that will be making its way to the airwaves next year.

Hey, great seeing you. Have a nice autumn.

The Lyin' Of The Senate

2009-08-27T13:34:00.003-04:00

There is a natural and proper tendency, following someone's death, to speak words of grace and admiration. Even if the deceased was an opponent, death tends to evoke a natural bonhomie that calls for at least muted words of praise.

For the past day, we've been inundated with tributes to the late Senator Ted Kennedy. Perhaps more than anything, it has been noted how grief-stricken his senatorial colleagues across the aisle are at his passing, since Kennedy was of the old school where "you could fight like dogs by day and then at 5 o'clock go have a drink together." In the clubby atmosphere of the Senate, conviviality is prized above all other attributes, and by all accounts, Ted Kennedy had that in spades.

I've tried to join in the eulogizing. After all, a man has just died. But after a day and a half of trying, I must finally admit: I just cannot do it.

Ted Kennedy was deeply harmful to the country. He espoused policies that have been damaging in so many ways that a full-length book could only begin to scratch the surface.

"But that's the 'before 5pm' stuff! You're supposed to let that go, Rabe."

Okay, let's do that for a moment. The problem is, Ted Kennedy was a terrible person after 5pm too. I do not doubt that he was fun to be around and friendly to his colleagues. But as old-fashioned as it may be, I have a sticking point: I just can't seem to get beyond that dead girl in the car.

"Oh, good grief. Chappaquiddick? Are you still on that? That was 40 years ago. Can't you just let it go?"

Well, no. From the time that Sen. Kennedy careened off the bridge on that fateful night in 1969 to the moment he arrived back at his cottage, 40 minutes elapsed. Kennedy reported the accident the next morning--after the car had already been fished out and the license plate identified. Authorities believe that Mary Jo may have lived for two hours in the car after it plunged into the water. In other words, to put a finer point on it, while Senator Kennedy was back in his cabin making calls to his advisers and plotting his next move, Mary Jo Kopechne was still possibly fighting for her life inside that sunken car, watching it gradually fill with the murky water that would finally drown her.

Through the rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, we discovered that Ted Kennedy had not become any better a person in the 22 years following Chappaquiddick, either. The indelible image presented at the trial of the then-59-year-old senator heading out to Au Bar with his son and nephew, followed by his infamous pants-less appearance before the ladies in his living room later that evening, conclusively demonstrated that Kennedy's lifelong dissipation continued.

Expelled from Harvard for cheating; culpable in the death of a 28-year old girl; parading around in front of women without pants on; notoriously drunken womanizer...sorry to be so out of touch with the zeitgeist, but this was not a good man. The fact is, he got 40 extra years of life that he didn't allow Mary Jo Kopechne, so I have no mournful feeling that somehow his time was cut too short.

It's not simply political or ideological. I could find complimentary things to say about lots of people whose policies I abhor: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and hundreds of others. In Ted Kennedy's case, I've tried to join the national mourning. But when I dig down for something complimentary to say about this guy, I'm afraid I find there's just nothing there.

Ted Kennedy Mary Jo Kopechne William Kennedy Smith

Wilsonian Wisdom

2009-08-18T15:04:00.002-04:00

Doug Wilson ably dissects the liberal jokers who justify abortion by claiming the body's freedom from government interference on the one hand while supporting state-run health care on the other:

This is just like that other popular saying on the Left -- keep the government out of bedrooms. Okay, I'm for that. Currently the government tells us how far apart the sheetrock screws have to be, how big the windows have to be for egress in case of fire, how far apart the electric outlets have to be, what kind of chemicals can be in the paint, and whether or not we can cut that tag off the mattress without getting the FBI involved. Sure, let's get government out of our bedrooms. Oh, you didn't mean that? You just meant you wanted them to be mute where God actually revealed something to us (as in, no, you can't marry your sister), and having begun the disobedience there, to legislate endlessly and like crazy about everything else, dictating the most minute details about your bedroom?

For nanny-staters, "freedom" is merely a slogan used to gain control. (Remember the "Employee Free Choice Act" that would've stripped workers of the secret ballot regarding unionization, and instead expose them to threats and intimidation? That's "freedom" to a liberal.) When liberals start talking about "freedom," always rest assured that they are getting ready to rob you of a heaping dollop of it.

You'd Have To Be A Rock Not To See It

2009-08-11T17:51:00.001-04:00

I came across an interesting story earlier today. A 9-year-old Florida boy at summer camp discovered an unusual rock on July 31st. He took it to a camp leader, who then took it to an amateur archaeologist friend, who then took it to some experts. According to the story, archaeologists at St. Leo University:

confirmed that the small piece of worked rock was a [6000 year old] Newnan spear point. It dates to the middle Archaic period when humans, who had been previously nomadic, started to settle in larger groups in various regional areas of Florida.

All of this raises an interesting question. The artifact was found on a wilderness trail among many other rocks. What made this boy think this particular rock was different from the others? And what makes archeologists believe, as one of them said, that “[p]eople took a lot of time to make these”? The answer is obvious: it shows all the marks of having been designed. Indeed, recognition of design and purpose is at the center of sciences like archaeology and forensics.

It’s also intuitive. This young boy isn't a scientist; he simply recognized that this rock bore the evidence of having been acted upon by an intelligent force where the other rocks did not. When we come home to an empty house, we know that note on the kitchen counter is not the product of blind chance and the continuous laws of nature. We know--and are held legally accountable for knowing--that a stop sign is not a random product of nature, but something designed to convey a message.

However, when it comes to biology, we're expected to ignore clear evidence of design. In fact, militant atheistic evolutionists have argued against Intelligent Design theory (ID) on the grounds that it is "unscientific" because it infers a designer from the appearance of design and fails to rely purely on naturalistic, undirected processes for explaining biological complexity. This was exactly the argument they made in the infamous Dover case, which a federal judge endorsed. Yet Richard Dawkins, strident atheist and author of The God Delusion, defines biology as “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” That's a very telling definition. Dawkins insists, however, that such things must not have been designed, trying his hardest to make the evidence fit his preconceived conclusion.By defining "science" as "explaining things in purely naturalistic terms with no recourse to design or purpose," they try to rule ID out by defintion rather than on the evidence.

Though clear evidence of design is an obvious scientific principle in archaeology and forensics, when it comes to biology the design inference is suddenly and inexplicably considered to be “unscientific.” Despite the existence of a universe that is almost inconceivably fine-tuned to support human life, the properties of language and information found in the tiniest cells, and the irreducible complexity of numerous biological structures, all life, the militant atheistic scientists say, must be the accidental product of blind, purposeless forces.

For them, every rock is just a rock--including those meticulously cut into the shape of arrowheads.

John Hughes, R.I.P.

2009-08-07T14:52:00.004-04:00

[I never do this, but with the passing of John Hughes yesterday, it seemed appropriate to re-post some thoughts I had on him back in 2006. I had always hoped he'd make a comeback, but in the words of Del Griffith, one of Hughes' more endearing creations, "I guess that's not gonna happen. Not now, anyway." If you were, as I was, a teenager in the mid '80's there's a pretty good chance that this guy was your Shakespeare.]

I've lately been pondering the career of John Hughes. (And yes, I'm aware of how sad that is.)

My recollections were occasioned by a CNN.com/Entertainment Weekly review of a new DVD version of "Ferris Bueller" that's coming out.

I don't know that there's ever been a bigger seven or eight year streak in the history of movies. From 1983 to 1990, he either wrote or directed (and in some cases both) the following films:

Mr. Mom (1983)
Vacation (1983)
Sixteen Candles (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Weird Science (1985)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)
She's Having a Baby (1988)
Uncle Buck (1989)
Christmas Vacation (1989)
Home Alone (1990)

I haven't even included some others during that period that stunk, like "European Vacation" and "The Great Outdoors."

Isolate only at the ones he directed. In one six year period as a writer/director, he cranked out:

Sixteen Candles
The Breakfast Club
Weird Science
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
She's Having a Baby
Uncle Buck

I think that's virtually unprecedented. These films might not be to everyone's taste (and with the exception of “Ferris” and “Uncle Buck,” none of them pushed the $80 million box office mark), but for people of my generation, these are seminal pictures. There's not a clunker in the bunch (though I know some might quibble with one here or there). There's not one on there I don't stop to watch when I pass by it flipping through channels.

Who has ever put a list together like that in that amount of time? Granted, he wasn't doing gritty, edgy stuff like Scorsese or something, but this guy was the Frank Capra of his time. "Home Alone" is the highest-grossing live-action comedy of all time, for goodness sakes.

And yet the guy hasn't directed a movie since "Curly Sue" in 1991--15 years ago. It's Jim Brown. It's Barry Sanders. It's Jordan, if he had stayed retired the first time. How do you put together that career in six years and then disappear? Where is he? At IMDB (which is where I got all this info), he appears to only be cranking out lousy, straight-to-video sequels of "Home Alone" and "Beethoven" as a writer anymore. Under a pseudonym, no less.

Related Tags: John Hughes, movies, Brat Pack, Ferris Bueller, directors, 80's

A Real Clunker

2009-07-31T15:46:00.002-04:00

Well, it turns out the the "Cash for Clunkers" program is a huge hit, and why shouldn't it be? People know a sucker when they see one, and you'll never have trouble drawing a crowd to line up for free money.

The problem, of course, is that, as the old saying goes, there is no such thing as a "free lunch." Somebody is always paying for it. That's also true of inflated payouts for junkmobiles: someone is paying for it. When Joe takes in his '89 Reliant station wagon (book value: $135) into the dealer and gets a check for $4500, that money is coming from somewhere; in this case, that "somewhere" is all the people who are not gulping out of the public trough.

They rifled through the first $1 billion allotted for the "Cash for Clunkers" in only a couple of days, but lo and behold, it turns out there are a lot more people in the country with cars worth less than $4500 who would like to get wildly-above-market prices for them. History has proved that the best way to get a wildly-above-market price on something is to have the government buy it, and this proves to be no exception.

But tough times call for tough measures, right? We need to stimulate the economy, so now is no time to be worrying about where the money is coming from. Can't we worry about all that later?

Well, not exactly. The major rationale for the "Cash for Clunkers" program is that it will supposedly stimulate the economy. Will it? Well, it will certainly stimulate one part of it: the moribund auto industry. But what benefit will that be to the economy overall?

Normally-sane, sensible people frequently seem to forget one fact: every dollar the government spends is a dollar it has taken from someone else, by force. (This is true even when the government turns on the magic printing press, thus devaluing the dollars everyone else is holding.) When the government gives a billion dollars to people who were still clinging to their Dodge Darts, it's a billion dollars that has been taken from other people, by force. And in addition to the simple moral wrong of stealing from one to satisfy the covetousness of another, we often overlook the fact that that's a billion dollars that won't be spent somewhere else.

All the government has done in such a scenario is take a bucket of water from one end of the pool and pour it into the other end of the pool, triumphantly declaring the water level to have been raised. What is unseen are all the things that money will not now be spent on. We see the benefit to the car owner and the car dealer, but what about people and companies to whom that money really belonged? They will now not be spending any of that billion dollars on opening a new branch, raising worker salaries, paying for medical insurance, building a house, or taking a vacation. They will not be investing it in mutual funds (which sends the money to companies which use the money to do things) or putting it in the bank (where it will be lent to people starting businesses or needing new capital). One sector of the economy benefits from the car deal, but it's at the cost of an untold number of other sectors that are hurt by it.

I see Congress is now scrambling to pump more money into the "Cash for Clunkers" program, since--surprise!--it's proving to be wildly popular. As I've heard the inimitable Walter Williams say, "Politicians love a visible beneficiary and an invisible victim."

Cash for Clunkers

Christians On The Dole

2009-07-27T15:11:00.003-04:00

Doug Wilson has a little something here to make just about everyone uncomfortable. Tough but necessary words:

...Christians who live in subsidized housing are part of the problem. Christians who use federal money to get their free education are part of the problem. Christians who get on Medicare so they can ding the taxpayers if anything goes wrong with their hobby of homebirthing are part of the problem. Christians on food stamps are part of the problem. Christians who use tax money to fund their mercy ministries are part of the problem. Christians who think that their health care would be more affordable for them if I paid for it are part of the problem.

Read the whole thing here. And read the follow ups here and here.

An Upside Down Society

2009-07-20T10:25:00.003-04:00

I just want to make sure I have this straight.

NFL player Michael Vick, who was convicted of organizing dog fights, was released today after serving 23 months in prison.

NFL player Donte Stallworth, who was convicted of a drunk driving accident in which he killed a man, was released earlier this month after serving a 24-day jail term.

Applying my admittedly rudimentary math skills, my calculations indicate that Stallworth served about one day in prison for each month that Vick served. Vick was involved in dog fighting; Stallworth killed a guy.

Huh.

Michael Vick Donte Stallworth

Stop The Insanity!

2009-07-08T15:43:00.002-04:00

I'm not generally one to complain about media attention for dead celebrities. In fact, I've frequently been know to even defend it on occasion.

So for me, the problem has not really been the amount of Michael Jackson coverage (though I have to admit being surprised--I would have expected this magnitude if he'd died perhaps 15 years ago, but not now, so far removed from his hit-making days and with so many years of freakishness and lurid allegations under his frilly cloth belt). As I said the day after his death, I was a fan of Jackson as an entertainer. It's the tone of some of the coverage that is getting really, really carried away.

Today puts the capper on it. This comes from Professor Cornel West (via John Kass in the Chicago Tribune), who desperately needs to have a drink and lie down for awhile:

It's almost like a crucifixion, in terms of the cross you have to bear...We reap the fruits of the resurrection, in terms of the power that emanates from [Jackson's] sacrifice. He sacrificed his childhood because he loved us so. He didn't just entertain us, he sustained us.

Yes, Joe Jackson so loved the world, that he sent his five begotten sons....

The rhetoric of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Michael Eric Dyson, and the usual collection of hucksters has been little less hyperbolic than West's. And all of this raises a few questions. For instance, when did Michael Jackson, who spent the last 20 years of his life trying to erase any vestige of his blackness, including (according to some reports) having "his" children conceived from the donated issue of another man so they wouldn't be black, suddenly become an African-American messiah?

Let's make something clear. Michael Jackson was not sacrificed by anybody, nor did he sacrifice anything for anybody. America did not "fail to appreciate him" as his brother Jermaine has laughably claimed over the past couple of weeks. Jackson made in the ballpark of $500-$700 million in his lifetime because people liked his records, videos, and concerts. He was on the cover of every major magazine dozens of times. Even now, he's receiving day-and-night coverage, 13 days after his death. America gave him all the attention he deserved and hundreds of times more. He was an extremely talented but very, very weird guy who made some horrible (and possibly criminal) lifestyle choices, and also made more than the GNP of some small countries off of a fawning American public. He made no "sacrifices," nor was he in any sense a savior of anything or anybody.

Okay, he had a tough childhood. So do about a billion Third World kids--and they don't get to spend the rest of their lives spending millions on choo-choo trains to recapture what they thought they should've had. The fact is, all things considered, America gave Michael Jackson a shot at an exceptionally good life, and he got to create for himself an idyllic childhood that lasted about 30 years longer than a real one would've.

So Cornel West, Al Sharpton, Jermaine Jackson, and a bunch of their media enablers need to relax for a few days before they say something embarrassing.

As if these guys were capable of being embarrassed.

Michael Jackson Cornel West John Kass Al Sharpton Jermaine Jackson Michael Eric Dyson

Did He Leave Home Without It?

2009-07-01T16:28:00.003-04:00

Despite the recent spate of celebrity deaths, the remaining members of my old "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list have been hanging on tenaciously since my last update after the death of Joey Bishop in October '07.

Until today, that is. Farewell, Karl Malden. Hey, you can't say the guy got cheated--he was 97!

Here's the updated list:

Doris Day

Harry Morgan

James Arness

Conrad Bain

Jack LaLanne

John Forsythe

Rose Marie

Al Molinaro

Barbara Billingsley

~~Karl Malden~~

Larry Storch

[**Since I haven't explained it in ages, it may be helpful to point out what this list actually is. It's not a traditional dead pool. It's entirely composed of people who have, for the most part, dropped out of the public eye. It's literally people who, when they die, you say, "I had no idea he/she was still alive!" That's why people who would otherwise be good candidates like, say, Larry King or Artie Lange, don't make the list. Even though I really can't believe either of those guys is still alive.]

The Chicken Or The Egg?

2009-06-27T17:23:00.002-04:00

CNN.com's current headline is, "Pop Star's Family Wants Answers, Says Jesse Jackson." For a minute, I thought, "Huh? What in the world does Jesse Jackson have to do with this? What possible connection does he even have to the Jackson family?" And then I suddenly remembered: ahh, the TV cameras.

The Thriller

2009-06-26T15:57:00.003-04:00

Obviously, there's not much left to be said nearly 24 hours into the media maelstrom surrounding the sad-but-not-entirely-unpredictable death of Michael Jackson. When I heard the news yesterday, my first several thoughts were about Jackson as the circus attraction he'd become over the past 20 years. The surgical mask. The plastic surgery. The shrunken (and partially false) nose. The abuse allegations. The chimp. The hyperbaric chamber. The Elephant Man's bones. The kid hanging off the balconay. To be honest, Jackson's death didn't draw much more than a shrug from me. "The freak show is over," was pretty much all that registered in my mind.

Sometime last night, however, listening to the endless coverage, a snippet of a song broke through, and it brought something back to me that I'd almost forgotten. There was a time, before Jackson dissolved into utter insanity, when he represented something good. Last night I tried to explain it to my kids, who have grown up in a world where Jackson was still ubiquitous, but only as the world's biggest sideshow oddity. There was a short period, I explained, around 1982-1985, when this guy was the most exciting performer that anybody had ever seen.

I told them about watching the Motown 25th anniversary special in 1983. On that program, Jackson did "Billie Jean" (lip-syncing, no less) and gave one of the most electrifying performances in television history. It was one of those ultra-rare occasions when you immediately realize you've just seen something that's going to change everything. On that show, Jackson did his famous "moonwalk" for the first time. The next day at school, we were all trying to do it. (Frankly, I've still never seen anyone perfectly replicate it.)

I showed them that performance on YouTube. I showed them the video for "Thriller." I told them about how one single after another rolled off that Thriller album, providing most of the soundtrack for 1983 and into '84. In addition to "Billie Jean," (paradoxically one of the most popular--and yet somehow still underestimated pop songs of all time), "Beat It," "Human Nature," "The Girl Is Mine," "PYT," "Wanna Be Starting Something," "Thriller." The album sold something like 27 million copies, but more importantly, those were amazing songs. I still defy anyone to show me more than a handful of albums that you would even plausibly argue belong in the discussion with Thriller in terms of top-to-bottom quality. Combine all that with Jackson's unparalleled abilities as a live performer, and you wind up with a unique, indelible cultural moment. Of course, as many have pointed out, that period was also his curse. You don't catch lightning in a bottle twice, though Jackson spent years vainly trying.

Sure, it's only entertainment. Yes, the media is in wild overkill over the story. Absolutely, the overwrought reactions to Michael's death say something unflattering about our society. Strip all that away for a moment. The fact that we abuse entertainment doesn't mean that there is no value in being wonderfully, expertly well-entertained on occasion. And nobody was more purely entertaining than Michael Jackson at his peak. In all the Jackson news we'll be inundated with over the coming days and weeks, the only tiny thing I have to offer is a plaintive reminder to just forget about all the insanity for a few minutes and consider what Michael Jackson did when he was doing it at his best. Do yourself a favor and watch that Motown performance and try to imagine the world seeing this for the first time. Watch (and listen to) "Beat It," and see what made him the defining face of MTV.

Sadly, that Michael Jackson died decades ago. But the loss of that Michael Jackson is worth lamenting.

Michael Jackson

Odds And Ends

2009-06-25T10:27:00.002-04:00

Like in that movie "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind," I'm starting to wish all collective memory of Gov. Mark Sanford could just be erased. Seriously--as a conservative and as a Christian, I'm beginning to understand why everybody hates us. Kudos to his wife for tossing his worthless arse out of the house, rather than participating in one of these humiliating Hillary/Mrs. Spitzer press conferences.

The government will make health care cheaper. You know, like hammers, when the military is buying them.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm trying out this Twitter thing we've been hearing so much about. (Though, to clear up some misunderstanding, I do not intend for "tweeting" to replace my thrice-yearly blogging. If you do the Twitter, feel free to find me @johnrabe.) Right now, there's usually at least one odd Twitter story per day. Today's? Apparently, Shaquille O'Neal found out last night that he was being traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers via Twitter.

The Daily Kos guy on the Mark Sanford news (via Twitter, again): "If Sanford and Ensign can fall, is there anyone safe from the gays' war on traditional marriage?" Ouch. I'm a staunch opponent of gay "marriage." But this barb draws some blood. The reason marriage as an institution in this country has ceased to mean much is not mainly because homosexuals want to marry each other; it's because so many of the people who profess to respect it prove by their actions that they don't really respect it. It's called "hypocrisy," and it's an all-too-valid rejoinder these days. It's not either/or; it's both/and. If we're serious about the importance of marriage, we'll oppose same-sex "marriage" (which is not marriage at all) AND uphold our own marriages.

It makes me sad that there will never be another chance to be the first person to smack Perez Hilton. "He" is suing the guy who hit "him," and is charging him with, among other things, "intentional infliction of emotional distress." Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the infliction of emotional distress pretty much Perez Hilton's life calling?

Mark Sanford health care Twitter Shaquille O'Neal Daily Kos Perez Hilton same-sex marriage

Time Flies; The White Bronco, Not So Much

2009-06-17T12:21:00.003-04:00

Sometime around the age of 30, it seemed as if someone had pressed the "double-speed" button on the remote control of my life. I remember my parents telling me how quickly time seemed to move once they got older, but I found that such assurances don't prepare you to handle the true surrealism of it. Now, when I'm asked how long ago some event occurred, I've learned to literally double my gut-estimate, and that usually pegs it just about right.

Anyway, all of this to say I was a bit surprised when an old coworker of mine reminded me on Facebook the other day that it was the 15th anniversary of the murders of O.J. Simpson's wife and her friend. And today, a few days later, is the 15th anniversary of the infamous low-speed chase on the freeways of Los Angeles after Simpson was named as the suspect in the murders.

What a strange week that was. My children, at the time, were 23 months old and five months old, respectively. What they know of O.J. Simpson is that he's a murderer and a pariah (and until recently walked free because of an incompetent prosecution). I've realized that it is impossible for them to understand what O.J. Simpson was before he killed these two people. If there is any former athlete today who is as personally adored as O.J. was, I can't think of him. Through talk shows, movies, sports commentary, and commercials, O.J. Simpson had woven himself into the fabric of American society in a way that even Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan could envy. I have no idea if they ever actually did favorability ratings on the guy, but if they did, I would be O.J. would've scored in the top 10% of all public figures in America.

That's what made that week so surreal. For those too young to have been there when O.J. was on top, it would be as if...oh, I don't know...Tom Hanks were suddenly being chased down the highway by the LAPD as a murderer.

That Friday is still very vivid in my mind. I was covering the Cardinals for KFNS, the all-sports station in St. Louis. After each game, we would do a live recap show from some local establishment featuring interviews with players. Right before the game, the television in the press lounge was blaring the press conference being held by the LAPD. Gil Garcetti, the district attorney, announced that not only was Simpson being charged with the murders, but that at that moment he was also a fugitive from justice. The jaded denizens of the press box literally gasped, as did the media members covering Garcetti on television. Simpson's friend Robert Kardashian haltingly read what appeared to be a suicide note from O.J. It was unreal.

It got weirder. A few innings into the game, someone came out of the lounge into the open air pressbox at the old Busch Stadium and told us that Simpson had been found and was being chased on the freeway. A bunch of us ran in to begin watching the drama unfold, while simultaneously trying to keep one eye on the game we were actually covering. All I remember is that the game finally ended, and I ran down to the clubhouse with the tape recorder to try to do interviews. It was useless. The players on both teams were repeating the scene from the press lounge, lined up in rows in front of the clubhouse televisions watching it all happen. I got some perfunctory comments about the game (the Cardinals had lost to the Pirates) from manager Joe Torre and a few others and scrambled off to some bar on Highway 40 we were doing that night's show from.

By the time I got back to the broadcast location, it became clear that nobody was interested in that night's game (nor in the NBA Finals game that had also been played). O.J. was now sitting in his Bronco on his driveway in Brentwood surrounded by SWAT teams. The worst-case scenario was looking more and more possible, and most of us were thinking "shootout." Right after I arrived with my post-game interview tapes that nobody cared about, we did a phone interview about O.J.'s legal situation with Jon Sloane, the station's morning host who was also an attorney. Then the station's general manager (who, as per usual on such occasions, was drunk out of his mind, and whose name is cleverly hidden in this series: xzxkszBobBurchxxxzx), who happened to be at the bar that night for some inexplicable reason, boozily ordered us to go back to the studio and start doing what turned out to be several hours of O.J. coverage. Man, did we scramble that night. We got one of O.J.'s NBC Sports colleagues (Todd Christiansen) on the phone late in the evening to give us his reactions. We strung a microphone into a little room at the station that had a TV in it and put the microphone up to the speaker on the TV set so that we could "carry" the LAPD press conference after Simpson's surrender.

The next day was the mug shot, and O.J. Simpson became the O.J. Simpson we now know. Decades later, it seems like it was never any other way. Jonnie Cochran and Robert Kardashian are long dead (with Kardashian's name now far more associated with his bimbo TV daughters than with him). Todd Christiansen has gotten rid of his mullet. Joe Torre went on to some moderate success after being let go by the Cardinals. My kids are now nearly 17 and 15 1/2. Fittingly, O.J. is spending this anniversary in prison, as he deserves. Though justice was not done in the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Smith, his criminal nature ultimately got the best of him and landed him where he belongs, albeit 14 years too late.

What A Twit

2009-06-10T13:06:00.002-04:00

For any of you who are into that kind of thing (and I'm still trying to figure it out myself), I'm now on Twitter @johnrabe.

The good news is, my posts are much shorter, and I do it more than once a month.

What Color Is The Sky In Your World?

2009-05-01T12:44:00.002-04:00

From NPR News, with my emphasis added:

[Justice David Souter] generally votes with [John Paul] Stevens and the two justices who were appointed by President Bill Clinton — making up the bloc of four more liberal members of the court, a group that has usually been in the minority throughout Souter's tenure.

Huh.

Oh, right, now I remember. How could I have forgotten that massive conservative overhaul of the Supreme Court that has remade the nation's jurisprudence over the last 19 years?

You Don't Say

2009-04-29T02:04:00.003-04:00

So I see Arlen Specter came out as a Democrat today. I haven't been this shocked since Clay Aiken announced he was gay.

Beauty And The Beast

2009-04-21T15:32:00.003-04:00

Okay, so help me understand this. There's a massive controversy over a beauty contestant, Carrie Prejean, who responded to a judge's a question about gay marriage by...giving her opinion on gay marriage. She thinks marriage should probably be between a man and a woman. And as a result, the World Has Come To An End.

Perez Hilton, the swishy gossip queen who asked the question, has gone into a full hissy, saying that the contestant is a "dumb b___" and worse.

Illiterate E! News anchor Giuliana Rancic Twittered (and let's just preface this whole thing with one giant sic), "...i know i'm a journalist, and i should be objective...but she is an ignorant discrace and she makes me sick to my stomach..."

(I'll tell u whuts a discrace, & thats a socalled journlist writing like that.)

The Boston Phoenix declares her "Ms. Bigot USA."

So what bile must she have spouted to earn such vituperation from the overheated left? Here's what Miss Prejean said, in its entirety:

"I think it's great Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what in my country, in my family I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman."

Light the torches. It doesn't get any more frothingly hate-filled than that.

Some other notable hate-mongers:

Barack Obama: "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. For me as a Christian, it's also a sacred union...I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage."

Joe Biden: "No, Barack Obama nor I support redefining, from a civil side, what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically a decision to be able to be left to the faiths and people who practice their faiths to determine what you call it."

Hillary Clinton: "Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage always has been, between a man and a woman."

In other words, the beauty contestant stated the identical view of homosexual marriage held by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Can we safely assume that all the adjectives applied to Miss California over the last couple of days apply to them as well? (Except for the ones used about the swimsuit portion of the competition, obviously. We've seen Hillary in a swim suit and...no. On the other hand, some of the same words were likely used in the media's rapturous reporting of President Obama's swimsuit outing a few months ago.)

At first I wondered why such a question about homo-sex marriage--with apparently only one acceptable answer--would be asked at a beauty pageant. Who in the world cares what "Miss USA" believes about gay marriage? But then I realized that it adds up, since only gay men watch beauty pageants anymore.

But it's gotten even more amazing as the high profile media poofter Hilton took a break from chasing the pool boy long enough to say on the Today Show this morning that, "I would have appreciated it had she left her politics and her religion out, because Miss USA represents all Americans." Get that? Bugger-boy asks Miss California a specifically religious/political question and then insists that she keep religion and politics out of her answer. Heads, I win, tails, you lose. I'm waiting for "him" to address the fact that President Obama also represents all Americans and states the exact same view.

I'll be over here holding my breath.

Miss USA Carrie Prejean Perez Hilton same-sex marriage Barack Obama Hillary Clinton Joe Biden Giuliana Rancic

Pull The Plug

2009-04-15T12:58:00.001-04:00

Doug Wilson has a timely reminder for self-proclaimed conservatives on tax day:

A good half of the American populace pays virtually no tax at all -- and many of them receive quite a few benefits. Those who do pay need to understand that they are not proposing simply to withhold funds from pointy-headed liberals in Washington. Those folks in Washington were shrewd enough to hook up a bunch of other people to the benefits, to butter their side of the bread, and so forth. If you go to one of these tea parties, realize that you are going to visit many of your fellow Americans in the hospital, and you are standing on their oxygen hose. Don't be surprised if you get a reaction.

Related to this, if you are receiving government payments in any of its redistributive forms, then you have no business going to one of these events. Food stamps, student loans, subsidized housing, public schooling, and so on -- your time would be better spent just staying home and trying to figure out how to disconnect the oxygen hose yourself.

More Sadness In The MLB

2009-04-13T18:59:00.003-04:00

What a lousy day. In the last five minutes checking the news sites, I've discovered that former Major League phenom Mark "The Bird" Fidrych and legendary Phillies announcer Harry Kalas have both unexpectedly died today.

Major League Baseball has had a bad run of it lately, beginning with the tragic death of Angels pitcher Nick Adenhart last week. Kalas was 73 and preparing to broadcast today's Phillies game. He had the kind of voice that anyone who ever got near a microphone envied, and though he made the baseball Hall of Fame, he's probably best known as being the huge voice of NFL Films in the post-John Facenda era.

Fidrych was only 54 and apparently had an accident fixing his truck on his farm in Massachusetts.

A Tribute To A Giant

2009-03-31T10:45:00.004-04:00

Last night, in a touching and tearful ceremony, the Miami Heat retired Alonzo Mourning's #33 jersey--the first retired number in franchise history. It reminded me of another touching and tearful Alonzo Mourning story that I recounted here a few years ago that I'd like to offer up again in tribute to 'Zo as the accolades and benedictions roll in:

When I worked at KFNS sports radio in St. Louis in the early 90's, we producers were looking to get some guests on the air. One of the ways we frequently did this was by "ambushing" (as we called it). "Ambushing" was simply calling a sports team's hotel, asking for the room of a player, and when he answered (the majority of them, suprisingly enough, register under their own names) asking him if he'd come on the air with us for a few minutes. It wasn't a fun job because many players understandably didn't care to be bothered in their rooms and could be a bit terse. Occasionally, however, there were some really nice ones, even among the stars. I recall Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling, Chipper Jones, and Andy Benes as being particularly friendly and accomodating. And NHL players were uniformly wonderful.

Anyway, ambushing wasn't the most fun in the world, so we'd get interns to do it when we could. One day, probably in '94 or '95, I asked one of our interns to try Alonzo Mourning in his room during a Heat road trip. The intern dutifully looked up the hotel number in the NBA media guide, got Mourning on the phone, and asked him if he'd be willing to come on the air with us for a couple of minutes.

"What's your name again?" Alonzo asked.

"Tim Brinks," repeated the intern.

"And where are you guys at?" inquired Mourning.

"St. Louis," said Tim.

"Well I'm going to come up there and find you, and I'm going to #&$@^!& kill you!" quipped 'Zo before slamming down the phone.

Good times.

Alonzo Mourning KFNS

Aslan Isn't Safe--But He's Good

2009-03-20T00:54:00.003-04:00

From Heaven is not My Home by Paul Marshall:

If we are ever going to change this trend and become a vital part of our world, we must begin to demonstrate that there is something vital and life-changing about Christianity. So much of Christian faith today is "nice." Cautious. Pleasant. Cheerful. Often if we are interesting to non-Christians at all, it is not because of our faith, but in spite of it. Christianity puts most people (often including ourselves) to sleep.

We have only to look at the example of our Lord to know that this is not the way our faith is to be lived. Whatever else Jesus was, and he was many things, he was never, ever "nice." (The term nice originally meant silly or stupid.) And he certainly wasn't boring. As Dorothy Sayers said:

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore; on the contrary, they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atomosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him "meek and mild," and recommended Him as a fitting household pate for pale curates and pious old ladies.

To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand. True, He was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before Heaven; but He insulted respectable clergyment by calling them hypocrites; He referred to King Herod as "that fox"; He went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a "gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"; He assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; He drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; He cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the manner of other people's pigs and property; He showed no proper deference for wealth or social position.

[Dorothy Sayers quote from Creed or Chaos?]

A Weekend With Nadab And Abihu

2009-03-09T11:29:00.003-04:00

Because of some unusual plans, I had the misfortune of surveying the current state of Christian television this past weekend. Actually, worse than that, I surveyed the condition of American churches through television. I'm not merely talking about the spiritual bankruptcy of much of the name-it-and-claim it dreck that normally appears on TBN, for instance. Even most evangelicals are able to recognize that for what it is these days. Rather, what I witnessed were a number of sermons that had recently been preached (and recorded) in evangelical mega-churches that then happened to be televised. These weren't just spectacles taking place in Christian TV studios with gold chairs and velvet chandeliers and leopard-skin footrests; these were worship services taking place in churches on Sunday mornings. David Wells once wrote, "God now comes to rest lightly and inconsequentially upon the Church." After this weekend, I've never been more convinced of that.

Among my discoveries:

The first thing that jumps out is the amazing cultural conformity. The scenario was invariable. Instead of a pulpit (even a Plexiglas one), there was a tall table like one would find at a coffee shop or a bar. There'd be a tall stool next to the table that the pastor would occasionally sit in. More often than not, there was a studiously placed Starbucks coffee cup placed just so on the table to show that, hey, the pastor is a normal guy just like you and me who needed to stop to get some coffee before he got here. (Occasionally, the coffee can be replaced by a conspicuous can of Diet Coke. Just look at this official picture of one megachurch pastor and think for a moment about how much thought had to go into placing that soda in that photo. And then think further about how utterly cynical that is.)

Jackets and ties are now verboten. Instead, the pastor must wear an untucked shirt over jeans or casual slacks. Puka shell necklace (or some other medallion) is optional but frequent. Hair must be mussed in the currently fashionable way, even if the pastor is embarrassingly past the age when such styles are recommended.

The messages are tied into whatever fad is hot this week. One guy had keyed a series of messages to the TV show "24." (A few years ago it was all "Matrix" stuff.) Just on a hunch I Googled "American Idol sermon series." To my absolute non-surprise, it returned 22,100 results. I guess at least some of those series are presumably addressing the issue of idolotry, meaning there could even be a little bit of biblical content there. Not so with "24.") It almost becomes fun. Google anything that's popular-- including something you think nobody would be foolish enough to turn into a sermon series--plus the phrase "sermon series." You'll never be disappointed. (Or, rather, you'll always be disappointed if you love God and the Bible.) "Sex in the City" plus "sermon series"? This guy did it. "Desperate Housewives"? You bet.

Props are ubiquitous. One pastor had a couple of doors up on stage. Another had a car battery recharger stand. Beds are increasingly common as these hip pastors all give that (same) racy message on sex--you know, the one the local TV news station did a story on and that they bought billboards for all over town. Watching some of these "services," I was waiting for someone to finally put the sheets of visqueen on the first few rows of pews and do Gallagher's old act. (That sounds outlandish, but upon asking around, I've discovered that the "24" guy actually did that too a couple of years ago. As part of a sermon illustration they put down plastic and smashed watermelons with mallets. No kidding.)

The messages I watched were all mildly comedic, "relevant" (in the evangelical conception of that word, which generally means "only two or three years behind the curve") and remarkably Jesus-free. One of the messages--being presented in a Sunday morning Christian worship service--was called (and I wish I were kidding about this), "Priceless Poop." The website address was flashed frequently so you could be sure to get a copy of this message for home. A visit to the website reveals that an earlier message in this same series was entitled...ahem..."Booty Calls." Another church had recently done the series, "My Naked Pastor." Then other messages I saw were more tame. One was a very sensible sermon on debt-reduction. Another was on health and fitness. All contained moderately helpful life tips, and all were wholly beside the point for a Sunday morning worship service.

The old, hidebound, non-relevant Apostle Paul once wrote to one of his churches, "And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified." Well, I guess Paul didn't get the memo that that stuff doesn't fly anymore. You've got to give them stuff they can use these days. You need to give them life hints. Tips for better living, interwoven with humorous asides. Not all this bloody-cross, dead-and-risen savior stuff.

On none of the programs did I hear the good news. Rarely did I even hear the name of Jesus. Instead, it was all "life principles" from "God's instruction manual" about what to do. And even then, the treatment was superficial. Debt, for example, was treated as an error in judgment rather than what it really is--an idolatry problem. As the prophet Jeremiah said, "They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Light healing is the order of the day. The messages I saw all had one clear idea in common: God is the way to get what you really want. Your goal in life is less stress, a stronger marriage, better relationships, and satisfaction at work. And God is the means toward helping you attain your idol...er...goal.

I'm far from the first to recognize that modern American Christianity has largely capitulated to the spirit of the age. Nor is this the first time even I've noticed it. But it took a solid day of sermon-watching to remind me how bad it's really gotten. Rather than sinners in need of a savior, modern mega-church Christianity presents us as merely unsatisfied people in need of satisfaction--or even more to the point, audiences in need of entertainment. In the meanwhile, our lampstand is in the process of being removed, and whatever light is left will only be here for a short time longer unless there is real repentance of this feathery, consumeristic nonsense in the American church.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Short Takes

2009-03-05T14:55:00.004-05:00

Hey, we've all got lives, right? (Except, of course, the hardy souls who've been keeping things going in the combox of the last post.) It's been a while, but here are a few quick hits while I've got a minute:

It turns out the Mr. Genius, the epitome of articulateness (such a supposedly welcome relief after the sub-simian blunderings of our last president) can't actually put two sentences together without a teleprompter:
Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual – not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events large and small.

...Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he's been saying for months – whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union.

Here's an amazing article on global warm...er...climate change from the Discovery Channel:
…according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.
I love the “should have” there. They’re mystified. But of course that won’t deter the alarmists:
"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970s was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."
In other words, it will stop happening. And then it will start happening again. Or maybe not. Where I come from, we call this "weather." (HT: Centuri0n)

Bob Greene has an absolutely wonderful commentary at CNN.com on the death of Paul Harvey. As I mentioned back in the very early days of this blog, I loved the fact that Paul Harvey was always still there doing what he was doing.

Speaking of the early days of this blog, Saturday will be the 6th blogoversary of Rabe Ramblings. It started out on March 7, 2003. And I pretty much ran out of stuff to write on March 10, 2003. To give you an idea of how long we've been around, in just the third post here, I mention "the possible war in Iraq." And Janeane Garofolo! She was merely irrelevant then. Now you couldn't pick her out of a lineup.

I read two books about the Supreme Court last month. The first, Battle for Justice by Ethan Bronner, chronicles the fight over the Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. Though the author's liberal bent peeks through in a couple of places, he really makes a commendable effort to be fair to all sides, and I found myself unable to put it down. Far less commendable was Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine. It's a great read packed with fascinating anecdotes about the current (and recently former) justices, but huge chunks of the book are just laughably tendentious, while others are demonstrably wrong. Toobin is writing a novel using real people as characters, and he won't allow any facts contrary to his storyline get through the grid. Well-written and entertaining, yet not worth your time except as a case study on how ridiculously biased people keep winding up as "analysts" on major networks.

So there you have it. Let's plan to meet back here again on the next anniversary,

Barack Obama teleprompter global warming Bob Greene Paul Harvey Ethan Bronner Battle for Justice Jeffrey Toobin The Nine Janeane Garofolo irrelevant

A Little Economic Portent

2009-02-11T01:12:00.003-05:00

Because of the iron-clad economic truth that every dollar the government spends is a dollar it will eventually have to raise through taxation, I decided to try to figure out what, say, two trillion dollars (a conservative estimate when it's all said and done) of government spending (which, as our president glibly reminds us, "Hey, that's what a stimulus package is! Yuk yuk yuk!") would cost each individual American taxpayer. But I couldn't do it because when I tried to enter two trillion into the calculator, it wouldn't go that high.

Don't worry, though. Everything will be fine.

Mac Is Back!

2009-01-23T16:01:00.003-05:00

After having given up his evil ways (i.e. trying to pretend to be semi-conservative) during the presidential election, the press is finding itself falling in love with John McCain all over again. Of course, if he had any sense, he'd spit at them for their attacks on him during the campaign, but instead--like the wife of the guy in the tank top on "Cops"--he loves them too much to leave them.

If you were to plot the media's view of McCain on a line, it would go something like this:

Love...love...love...love...love...love...love...love...love...love...ALL-CONSUMING, RAGE-FILLED HATE...love...love...

The weird historical coincidence of it all is that the all-consuming, rage-filled hate period just happened to precisely coincide with the period where McCain was running against Barack Obama for president! What are the chances? Amazing how the objective media suddenly recognized his turn toward black-hearted evil just as he was running against Obama. And now that Obama has been inaugurated, they recognize McCain's turn back away from it.

He's clearly a changed man now. The sky has opened, and McCain's dark soul has been redeemed. At least I'm assuming that's what happened because the media suddenly loves him again. From today's Washington Post:

Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick

...Two and a half months removed from his defeat in the race for the presidency, colleagues say, McCain bears more resemblance to the unpredictable and frequently bipartisan lawmaker they have served with for decades than the man who ran an often scathing campaign against Barack Obama. In some instances, he's even carrying water for his former rival.

"Mac is back!" one of his devoted friends in the Senate declared as McCain walked into the chamber Wednesday to deliver his first speech of the 111th Congress: a blunt admonishment of Republicans delaying Hillary Rodham Clinton's confirmation as secretary of state.

Yes, you remember that scathing campaign McCain ran, where he chastised his own crowds for questioning Obama's national origin and fired a campaign aide for putting together an ad shedding light on the Jeremiah Wright comments? And who could forget the smear attack in which he brutalized Senator (now Secretary of State) Hillary Rodham Clinton, spitting "She has inspired generations of American women to believe that they can reach the highest office in this nation, and I respect her campaign, and I respect her."

Yes, McCain has turned from the Dark Side and is a new man. And lucky us, the objective, mainstream media is there to document the miraculous transformation.

A Day That Lives In Infamy

2009-01-22T17:44:00.003-05:00

I'm reprinting this from Challies.com, where John Ensor of Heartbeat International has guest posted today. Normally I would just print an excerpt, but I don't want to risk any of this being lost by your not clicking through the link. I hope Tim won't mind. The post marks this 36th anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision:

Why Are We Striving to Make Abortion Unthinkable?

Today I join hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in the annual March for Life

In doing so, I acknowledge the resistance, even offense, taken by many by asserting that abortion is the moral issue of our day. I am familiar with the claim that asserts equal concern for poverty, global warming, aids prevention, war, and more. All of these appear to me worth researching and debating, as iron sharpens iron, as to the various causes and possible solutions.

But abortion is not on par. I remember how and when I came to this conclusion. It was the week of February 12, 1990, as marked on the Newsweek magazine I was reading. Kim Flodin, in an article on why she did not counter-march for abortion rights, wrote, "I was pregnant, I carried two unborn children and I chose, for completely selfish reasons, to deny them life so that I could better my own" (My Turn).

There it was: a momentary lapse into honest concrete language about abortion from an advocate. No ancient Baal worshiper could have described the reasons for their child sacrifice better. I was stunned that it had to be stated so plainly for me to grasp the preeminent evil of it. It is not one issue among equal concerns. Abortion is our postmodern version of child sacrifice for the Me Generation. As such, it is an incomprehensible and unthinkable evil.

Unthinkable is the best word to describe it because that is the way God describes it. "The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah saying, . . . "They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination" (Jeremiah 32:35; cf. 7:31, 19:5).

Among the many ways we offend God, the greatest offense are the shedding of innocent blood and idolatry. These two come together in child sacrifice. At the outset, God taught Israel to be shocked and repulsed by its practice among other cultures. "You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods" (Deuteronomy 12:31). The word even here rings remarkably close in meaning to unthinkable or something that "did not enter into my mind."

Some years ago, a woman named Suzanne came to me while I was setting up a pregnancy-help clinic in Boston. She said, "If I have the abortion, I will have more money to spend on my other two children." I asked, "What do you think your children would say if they knew you were doing this so that they could have cable TV and other stuff?" She said, "Well, I'll ask them." Then and there I knew the baby would live. Abortion is unthinkable to children--incomprehensible, horrific, something that would never enter their minds to do. Sure enough, the children were aghast at the thought. "We want the baby," they reassured her. Some months later, after the baby arrived, I heard her share her story. She said she was embarrassed to think back on her earlier state of mind. She had joined the circle of those who think abortion unthinkable.

Sanctity of Human Life Week is like Good Friday--a sobering time to stare unflinchingly past the ho-hum of abortion as a common practice; to grieve, lament, and morn; then to take up our cross and humbly obey God's call to "prosper" the cause of the fatherless and "defend the rights of the needy" (Jeremiah 5:28). In this context, that means becoming cross-bearers for child-bearers.

*****

John Ensor is the Vice President of Heartbeat International

A Thrill Up The National Leg

2009-01-20T16:18:00.002-05:00

Observations on this historic inauguration day, as Barack Obama is now the President of the United States:

With tousled hair, NPR just pulled the sheets up and is now smoking a cigarette.

Now that Obama is officially president, the honeymoon is over and the media has begun asking the tough questions. Which will he do first: heal the sick or raise the dead?

Hey, how about that oath of office with Obama and John Roberts? I don't think I've seen an exchange that awkward since the Sammy Sosa/Mark McGwire 62nd homer half-handshake half-hug. Or, to quote Dennis Miller from another context, "I haven't seen choreography that stiff since the Lee Harvey Oswald prison transfer.

Sadly, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) apparently collapsed at Obama's inaugural lunch with Congress today. On the other hand, let's be honest--it's merely one of thousands of times Ted Kennedy has collapsed at lunch. He is now said to be alert--a vast improvement over the middle 60 years of his life.

Strangely enough, Senator Robert Byrd (KKK-Virginia) also collapsed at the luncheon. Apparently the former Klansman fainted upon the realization that a black man is now president.

I'm glad we finally got rid of the elitist Bush Administration so that we can finally have an administration that looks like the real America. I loved that pro-choice feminist transgendered hermaphroditic brass band wearing hemp uniforms and Birkenstock shoes and riding in the electric car in the parade. Just like home.

Click

2009-01-06T16:30:00.003-05:00

Tap, tap, tap....(blow, blow)...(feedback)...does this thing still work? Hello? Testing, testing, one, two, three...

So now the report comes that President Obama has offered Dr. Sanjay Gupta the job of surgeon general. That's terrific. Maybe Anderson Cooper still has a shot at Secretary of the Interior (Design).

I guess it's only fair though. Obama owes CNN a lot. I'd figure he'd be naming journalists to just about every post.

I enjoyed this bit from the Washington Post's story on it:

The Michigan-born son of Indian and Pakistani parents, Gupta has always been drawn to health policy. He was a White House fellow in the late 1990s, writing speeches and crafting policy for Hillary Clinton.

But despite all that, the open-minded CNN was able to find a place for him anyway.

CNN Sanjay Gupta surgeon general Barack Obama

A Partridge In A Baobab Tree

2008-12-08T10:49:00.004-05:00

This is the first version of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" I've ever been able to stand. It doesn't hurt that they somehow find a way to work in, among other things, Toto's "Africa."

(HT: Pentamom)

Pass The Dramamine

2008-12-03T13:32:00.004-05:00

Hey, now Bill Richardson is part of the new cabinet. Ooh, stop with all the change! You're making me dizzy here.

Donna Shalala, call your office.

Condolences

2008-12-01T12:38:00.002-05:00

One of the regular visitors and participants in our comment threads here, Anne Ivy (whose blog can be found near the top of my sidebar), suffered a real tragedy this weekend. Only a couple of weeks ago, Anne's husband of 37 years, Don, was diagnosed with pneumonia. A little over a week ago, he was hospitalized. A few days after that, the doctors discovered that what they thought was pneumonia was actually advanced (and aggressive) lung cancer, and Don died this past Saturday afternoon.

I know that Anne and her family (they have six grown children) could use all of our prayers over the coming days and weeks.

I've put myself in your place a lot of times over the past few days, Anne. I can hardly imagine the shock of this. My deepest sympathies to you and your family.

We're Gonna Party Like It's 1999

2008-11-20T10:25:00.002-05:00

So we are into the first few weeks of "Change We Need." Let's see:

Co-chairman of transition team: John Podesta

Chief of Staff: Rahm Emmanuel

Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton

Attorney General: Eric Holder (You'll remember him from the Mark Rich pardon)

Chief Counsel: Greg Craig

Veep's Chief of Staff: Ron Klain

Hey, Janet Reno and Robert Reich, make sure not to go on vacation without leaving a number you can be reached at in case they need you to help bring more "change" to Washington.

And Then I Woke Up

2008-11-19T12:55:00.003-05:00

Real life intruded for a bit. Sorry about the long absence. I'd been feeling fatigued, so I laid down and had this crazy dream that Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for president and then he actually got elected! I know, crazy, right?

Part of the reason I haven't posted is because I've felt the need to write something long about the future of conservatism, and I just haven't had the time for a long, thoughtful post. Which has never stopped me before. (Ba-DUM-bum.) I've also wanted to do my post-mortem of the McCain campaign. But most of it has already been said by now. Still, just for the sake of posterity, I'll throw a few of my thoughts out there over the course of a post or two (or three).

First, the future of conservatism. The election did not represent some massive shift in the electorate. The race was about even until the economy tanked. People were scared about it, and Obama appeared sure-footed while McCain was anything but. Obama won 52% of the vote. That's convincing (unless, of course, 52% of the people in, say, California vote to protect traditional marriage, in which case 52% is a practically laughable, meaningless number that we should all ignore). But it does not indicate some massive ideological shift.

McCain was a lousy, non-conservative candidate who (because of that) drew almost zero help from outside 527-type groups, had the entire national media working tirelessly against him, had no clear message, ran from the same party as a wildly unpopular incumbent president, was outspent in the campaign by several magnitudes, stumbled at a crucial point when the economy collapsed--and still finished within about 8 million votes of Obama in a 300 million-person nation. And since one more than 50% is a majority, that means that there were really only about 4 million actual voters separating McCain and Obama. Flip those 4 million and the election goes the other way. Considering the stacked deck, that's amazing. I predicted, because McCain was such a bad candidate, that he'd lose 40 states. He did much better than I expected. If nothing else, it shows that the country has experienced nothing close to a sea change, no matter what the pundits say.

The fact is, this is still a center-right country. Two states that Obama won also passed marriage amendments. 62% of people in Florida --which Obama won--voted to approve a marriage amendment. Social conservative issues are still a political winner when presented well. McCain inexplicably decided to minimize social conservative issues, and he lost as a result, garnering no real fervor from his own side while failing to win any converts from the other side either. But when social issues come up for a vote, the American public in general shows itself to be socially conservative.

For instance, every single state (more than 30 of them) that has had a chance to outlaw gay marriage has done it. Think about it: why did Obama feel the need to disguise himself as a social conservative? Obama came out in opposition to gay marriage (and if you believe him on that, I have some land just west of me here in Florida...) and claimed to want to reduce the number of abortions (though Planned Parenthood and NARAL ardently supported him). Why did he present himself that way? Because he knows that the country won't vote for gay-marrying, open abortion-without-restriction loving politicians, that's why. Even on economic issues, Obama made the most headway on McCain running to his right. Obama's main economic argument was that he was going to cut more of your taxes than McCain was. And he was able to accurately criticize Republicans for being irresponsible on spending. Ultimately, I'm confident that Obama will not prove to be better on any of these scores because he's a Democrat and will do what Democrats always do. But the point is, he won by stealing essentially conservative positions from the hapless Republican candidate.

Many voices in the Republican Party are calling for an abandonment of conservatism. To which I say once again, "How about trying conservatism?" So-called "compassionate conservatism" ends up being neither, and it has been a huge failure. The mortgage mess was caused by big-government policies. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both created by big-government policies. The extremely unpopular bailout is a big-government policy. How do these things impugn actual conservatism? The answer is: they don't. They do impugn a chunk of the Republican Party. But not conservatism. When Republicans run for the presidency as solid conservatives, they win. When they run as mealy-mouthed middle-of-the-roaders, they lose. Sure, conservatism needs to have a smile on it. Nobody wants Newt Gingrich to be president (except perhaps Newt). But presented well, conservatism is still a winning proposition.

Whatever the pundits say, don't forget that at the end of the day, people elected a guy who said he was going to cut their taxes, curb federal spending, reduce the number of abortions, and opposes gay marriage. How exactly does this prove the death of conservatism?

The Morning After

2008-11-05T10:40:00.004-05:00

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people,for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. (1 Timothy 2:1-2)

There will be plenty of time for criticism later (like, say, later today). But the people have spoken strongly, and they want Barack Obama to be the 44th president of the United States.

I believe in this system even when I don't like the outcome. For eight years, I've watched disgustedly while the far left says of George W. Bush, "He's not my president!" That's a sub-American position that I refuse to wallow in.

Barack Obama will be my president. I will mostly disagree with him. I wish it were someone else. But for better or for worse, he is now our representative to the world, and because I love my country, I want him to do well. If he's doing well, the country is likely doing well.

Because of that, my family and I are praying for President-elect Obama. We pray that he will have wisdom and strength to do a very difficult job. We pray that his eyes will be opened to the horror of abortion. We pray that he will lead justly and righteously. We pray that God might perhaps use Obama's election to finally heal some of the deep racial fissures that still divide this country. We pray for his protection and safety, as many would wish to do him harm.

I woke up feeling great today. Not because the election went my way, but rather because, in a sense, all elections go my way. The reason for this is that my God is an un-elected God, and He does not change with the winds of public opinions. He sits above all earthly rulers and authorities, and indeed He is their very creator. He builds up and He tears down. He raises up empires and overthrows them. He installs presidents and he removes them. In the words of the great Westminster Confession of Faith, "God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass." The president's authority is only a delegated authority--it's given by God, and God can take it away whenever He sees fit:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. (Romans 13:1)

The sovereign God is bringing about exactly what He intends to bring about. It may well be that He is executing judgment on our nation. He would certainly be just to do so. But in any case, the world (and our nation) is right on track toward the purpose He's established for it. There is no politician who gets in the way of that.

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will. (Proverbs 21:1)

So on this day after Barack Obama's election, I rejoice. Not because I think he's the best man for the job (though I will be praying for him nonetheless), but because God is God, and He is good. Everything--everything--He does is for the good of His people.

Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD, O my soul! I will praise the LORD as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.
Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
on that very day his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the LORD his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.

The LORD sets the prisoners free;
the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
the LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the sojourners;
he upholds the widow and the fatherless,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The LORD will reign forever,
your God, O Zion, to all generations.
Praise the LORD! (Psalm 146, ESV)

The Case For McCain

2008-11-03T09:47:00.005-05:00

I've already voted here in Florida, and I cast my vote for John McCain. McCain is far from my ideal candidate, which I've detailed in this space ad nauseum. But ultimately, I cast my vote for him with a clean conscience. Following are my three major reasons (only the first of which really matters). I'd particularly like to communicate these to confused evangelicals who are considering casting an Obama vote tomorrow.

1. McCain is solidly anti-abortion, while Obama is the most radically pro-abortion presidential candidate in history.

I am proudly, unapologetically a one-issue voter. To compare any other issue to the abortion holocaust is to engage in a breathtaking moral equivalence. It is not a viable Christian option to say, "Well, I disagree with Obama on abortion, but I agree with him on taxes [or whatever]." You cannot draw a moral equivalency between the wholesale eradication of human lives and other issues. To do so is to demonstrate one's self to be a moral midget. You can get away with this (indeed, it's expected) if you are a secularist, but it is not an option for a Christian. Imagine saying in 1860, "Well, I agree with Abraham Lincoln on the slavery issue, but I agree with the pro-slavery candidate John C. Breckinridge on taxes." You don't settle that with an eenie, meenie, miney, moe. As Doug Wilson has aptly said, abortion is the big E on the moral eye chart. If you don't get that one right, your eyesight can't be trusted on anything.

Many have been duped by Obama's simple assertion that his policies will lead to fewer abortions. It's just a flat-out lie, which is easily enough discovered by anyone wishing to dig an inch below the sound bite. Obama said in one setting that he views a baby as punishment that a pregnant girl shouldn't have to suffer, analogous to a sexually transmitted disease. The fact is that Obama has assured Planned Parenthood that he will immediately institute the "Freedom of Choice Act" (or FOCA) which will repeal almost all local restrictions on abortion. Michael New has crunched the numbers and determined that this would likely result in an immediate increase of about 125,000 abortions a year. How long would the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have to go on to kill that many people? If you are willing to overlook this issue, you need to take a serious look at where things stand between you and God.

2. He's not Obama.

Granted, this has seemingly been McCain's entire strategy, and I'm not sure that it's strong enough to win a national campaign, especially considering that Obama has been the beneficiary of an entirely, utterly uncritical media for the last several years. But it is still a powerful point in McCain's favor. Obama is the most radically leftist candidate to ever sniff the presidency, and the nation is perhaps one day from sweeping him into office. He's already been endorsed by al Qaeda and communist quasi-dictator Hugo Chavez.

Obama's life and career have been intimately intertwined with characters like Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright, William "I don't regret setting bombs" Ayers, and former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi. He lied when pledging to stick to public financing of his campaign. He threw the elderly white grandmother--who raised him--under the bus (calling her a "typical white person") in an attempt to defend the indefensible Jeremiah Wright. When defending Wright became too politically cumbersome, Obama threw Wright under the bus too. Just this past week, he also threw his Kenyan aunt (who even gets a mention in his memoir!) under the bus, in his relentless drive to the presidency. There soon won't be enough buses for all the people Obama wants to run over. And we're about to elect this guy president.

3. McCain is a genuine hero, while Obama is a complete neophyte.

Sarah Palin, quite properly, reminds voters that "only one person in this race has actually fought for you."

In the wake of the sad suicide of the author David Foster Wallace, I was reading some of his work online, which includes this piece [WARNING: graphic language--adults only] written in 2000 for Rolling Stone magazine about the first McCain presidential campaign. Reading the graphic description of McCain's treatment in Vietnam, I found myself actually brought up short for some of the harsh things I've said about McCain in the past. After being shot down,

He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant's office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain's father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true — both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused. The U.S. military's Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who'd been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a "punishment cell." Maybe you've heard all this before; it's been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? You simply can't know for sure. None of us can. It's hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you'd react.

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he's capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest.

Frankly, we no longer deserve a president with this kind of honor, but maybe God will be merciful and give us one anyway.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama has been groomed for the presidency since when, as a callow Illinois state senator, he was anointed to give the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Then, after being elected to the U.S. Senate that same year, he spent 143 days in session, at which point he felt he was now sufficiently prepared to become president of the United States and launched his campaign. His entire national political career has been shorter than only the time McCain was imprisoned after refusing a dishonorable release. Obama's own running mate admits Obama is completely untested and unproven, saying during the primary campaign that "the presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training." And more recently (and famously), Biden predicted that other nations would try to take advantage of Obama's manifest inexperience.

I have no problem with someone who sees the two-party system as in need of drastic reform and decides to vote for a third-party candidate. I understand that and have flirted with it myself. But for a professing Christian to cast a vote for Obama displays either a naivete, an almost willful ignorance, or a hardening of heart that should be cause for deep concern. I pray that Christians will not participate in the national blindness that has befallen us. You will someday account for your vote (or your failure to vote) before a just and holy God. Think about that before you pull the donkey lever just because you think Obama's got some good ideas about tax rates.

Osama Bin Laden For Obama And Biden

2008-10-30T21:15:00.006-04:00

This year, as in 2004, al Qaeda will once again be rooting for (and perhaps with the aid of ACORN even voting for) the Democrat:

DUBAI (Reuters) - An al Qaeda leader has called for President George W. Bush and the Republicans to be "humiliated," without endorsing a party in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, according to an Internet video posting.

"O God, humiliate Bush and his party, O Lord of the Worlds, degrade and defy him," Abu Yahya al-Libi said at the end of sermon marking the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, in a video posted on the Internet.

Hey, and make sure to get your bumper stickers before Tuesday!

O sb a m a - Bi~~n La~~den

Barack Obama Joe Biden Osama Bin Laden Al Qaeda Al Qaeda endorses Obama More terrorists for Obama

A Pebble In Your Shoe

2008-10-28T17:27:00.003-04:00

This column by Rich Lowry beautifully sums up everything I think about John McCain and his candidacy. Sure, a week before the election seems like an odd time to write a post-mortem, but c'mon, who are we kidding here?

While McCain likes to characterize himself as a maverick, in reality he's always been more of a gadfly--a persistent, annoying critic.

As a gadfly, McCain often attacked Republican campaign tactics. He denounced the Swift Boat vets in 2004. Still thinking like a gadfly, back in April he reprimanded the North Carolina Republican Party for running an ad featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In ruling Wright out of bounds, McCain had taken off the table Barack Obama’s most damaging association. McCain had gadflied himself!

Not surprisingly, McCain has been badly outclassed in fundraising by Obama. As a gadfly, McCain always considered fundraising fundamentally distasteful. He celebrated the public financing rules that Obama has blown by on his way to raising some $750 million. McCain was so adamant about campaign-finance strictures that he harangued against independent groups, so-called 527s, and partly as a result, there are few of them to come to his aid in his desperate hour of financial need.

There's a big part of me that loves to see McCain lying on this bed of his own making, but it's unfortunate that it has had to come at such an important time for the country.

...Gadflies are loners because they spend so much time offending their own side. In his initial primary campaign prior to the 2007 meltdown, McCain staffed up with Bush loyalists — because there were so few McCain loyalists — who didn’t understand his appeal. Now, his general-election campaign is rife with former Bush staffers leaking to the press to save their post-McCain campaign reputations. Ah, the agony of the gadfly.

Outside his campaign, meanwhile, McCain is getting abandoned by all the Republicans who usually pronounce themselves “troubled” by Republican tactics. If McCain weren’t running for president, and it were some other Republican who had attacked Obama for his associations and picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, surely McCain himself would be on some Sunday show clucking his disapproval.

That last paragraph is it exactly. Mark my words. It will only be a few months after the election before McCain himself will be taking shots in the press at Sarah Palin and attempting to align himself with Obama and the new Democratic majority. It's what he does. He'll be the first Republican lining up to praise the other party, which has always been his role in the media.

It's All About The Children

2008-10-24T09:29:00.003-04:00

Two months ago, Democrats on the Left were pretending to wring their hands about how would Sarah Palin be able to raise her children if she were to become Vice President of the United States. Now, the same people are complaining that Palin takes her youngest children with her on the road when she has to travel.

Here's a clue to keep things simple for you: when liberals claim to care about family values, they're lying. As I pointed out last month, the utter, disingenuous hypocricy of liberals asking, "But how will she take care of little Trig?" was nothing but laughable. The fact that she didn't have his brain sucked out of his body already put Mrs. Palin up 1-0 over the liberals in the Caring About Trig department. Taking the child with her on the road while liberals caterwaul now puts her up 2-0.

Sarah Palin Sarah Palin's travel

First Things First

2008-10-21T13:26:00.004-04:00

If you know clueless, confused evangelicals who are considering casting a vote for Obama this year (and sadly there seems to be many of them), make sure to send them this short video:

I'm not a big email forwarding kind of guy, but this is something I'd like anybody who cares about being pro-life to see.

Barack Obama abortion Planned Parenthood FOCA

A General Consensus

2008-10-20T14:03:00.004-04:00

A lot of predictable media hay is being made about Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama. All it proves to me, of course, is that I was (if I may humbly say) right on target in my recent post about the corrupting effects of the vast foreign policy bureaucracy. As I said there, Powell (like most Secretaries of State) is the very definition of squishy moderate and simply a strategic chess player with no moral clarity or big picture.

However, what's highly amusing is to watch Gen. Powell's overnight transformation. For at least eight years, liberals have been calling Powell an evil "Uncle Tom." Now suddenly he's an all-around great guy and a true statesman. Here's a hint that will help you discern how these things work: when liberals hail an American military figure as a "hero," you're being conned, because in reality they do not believe there's any such thing. It's one of the surest warning signs that something has gone fishy. Turns out the problem wasn't that he was "in the house," it's that he was in the wrong house.

Colin Powell Barack Obama

A Blip Of Life

2008-10-16T09:37:00.004-04:00

After two desultory debate performances, John McCain finally came out strong last night. I'm no cheerleader (as my past posts will prove--I've seen Obama as the clear winner of the first two debates) and it may be too little too late, but for the first time in the campaign, I was able to watch McCain for more than a few minutes without wincing. He even got a couple of fist-pumps out of me. If nothing else, I'd love to see the "Senator Government" slip of the tongue stick.

Of course, the pundits didn't know quite what to make of it all. I'm discovering more and more how useless the immediate post-debate analysis is. The analysts are all afraid of looking silly a day or two later when the debate narrative finally gets fixed in the public consciousness, and history shows that it doesn't always go as it seemed to the journalists. So what happens is that each analyst throws out careful little trial balloons and then they all watch each other to see if they can come to a consensus. I happened to be watching ABC News last night (since I wanted to see the debate in HD, but CNN's ridiculous little "Ohio Undecided Voter" running dial is driving me nuts; undecided female voters in Ohio are officially the stupidest species on the planet). At the end of the debate, former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos opined that McCain had done unusually well. After about five minutes of other analysts like George Will and Donna Brazille pouring water on the fire, they went back to George, who now was saying that McCain didn't accomplish what needed to be done. Stephanopoulos basically switched positions on the debate within a five minute period.

So, all of that said, I think McCain won handily last night. Here would be my unsolicited advice for the remainder of the campaign. First, I would continue with the "I'm not George W. Bush" line of argument. It was very effective, and he should've been using it earlier. If I were advising him, here's exactly what I'd have him saying: "If Senator Obama wanted to run against George W. Bush, he should've run four years ago. Back when Senator Obama was still working with Bill Ayers, I actually ran against George W. Bush for president. I knew he didn't have all the answers. That's why I opposed him. I didn't think he had the answers then, and I don't think he has the answers now. Let's make one thing clear here: Senator Obama talks a good game, but when the chips were on the table, I'm the one who stepped up and ran against President Bush."

I would also keep going on Obama's tax-raising plan. He lets Obama squirm out of this too easily. I would have McCain say, "Senator Obama says he's not going to raise your taxes--he's only going to raise taxes on your employer. If you work for a corporation or a company that has more than three or four people working for it--which is all it takes to be a $250,000 business--Senator Obama is going to raise taxes on your business. He's been telling us that over and over again. He told Joe the Plumber that. So when he does that, do you think your job is going to be more secure, or less secure? When Senator Obama begins cutting into the profits of your employer, how do you think they're going to make up the loss? Does that put you in a better situation at work, or a worse one? This is common sense, folks. The good news is, Senator Obama might not raise most of your personal income taxes. The bad news is, when he's done with your workplace, you might not have any income. I don't think we should raise taxes on anyone. That's the difference between us."

I was glad to finally see McCain get in some shots on abortion, and Torie Clarke was dead wrong on ABC when she said this was a waste of time because it "only appeals to the base." Generally the country is pro-choice in the first trimester, when the health or life of the mother is at risk. However, once you get past the first trimester, American opinion becomes overwhelmingly, decidedly anti-abortion. McCain didn't pin Obama down on this nearly as hard as he needs to--though it was at least a good start after months of silence. Obama is for infanticide, plain and simple. As Robert George of Princeton shows, Obama is not merely pro-"choice," he is pro-abortion (despite his empty denials), and the more the better. His position is wildly outside of the American mainstream (as McCain pointed out), and he needs to keep hitting the fact that Obama is in the infanticide lobby's pocket. Late-term abortion is a winning issue for Republicans, and it's time they wised up to this.

Someday You Will Give An Answer To God

2008-10-15T09:38:00.003-04:00

This piece by Princeton professor Robert George ought to be required reading for any Christian who would even consider voting for Barack Obama. It should probably also be required for all Christians under about 30, who seem unusually confused on political issues. George makes the case that Obama is the most radically pro-abortion national politician in history.

Wanna Lose Some Sleep Tonight?

2008-10-09T23:49:00.002-04:00

Have a look at these words of wisdom from Louis Farrakhan, in which he gives Barack Obama a promotion:

D.O.A.

2008-10-08T00:32:00.003-04:00

As they used to say on "ER" back when anyone was watching it, "Okay, I'm calling it."

Stick a fork in Senator McCain, folks. He's done. I began this campaign back in February by predicting that Obama would beat McCain 40 states to 10. It may be closer than that...slightly...but when all is said and done, I'm still predicting a landslide. And the Republican establishment will have nobody to blame but itself. McCain was a terrible candidate from the git-go who inspires nobody. Even now, less than a month out from the election, I have no idea what the raison d'être of his campaign is. As best I can tell, it's "I want to be president. And I'm not Barack Obama." Unfortunately for him (and for the country), that's not nearly enough.

All McCain has to offer is squishy, centrist palaver that fails to differentiate him much from either Bush or Obama. His main solutions to the economic disaster are merely lighter versions of Obama's socialism. He's never once made a solid public case for the fact that Democrats are knee deep in the current crisis, and that the disaster can be easily traced back to Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Bill Clinton. Instead he's sat there dumbly while Democrats (who've held the Congress for the last two years) amazingly pin a meltdown on their watch to free market economics.

The fact is, McCain deserves to lose. He's not a conservative. He's really not even a Republican. For all the "maverick" talk, he's always been a moderate Democrat in Republican garb. For years he was the media's favorite Republican-bashing Republican, and he let it make him think that their favor would extend to a run against an actual Democrat. He was spectacularly wrong.

At root, the whole evening is summed up best by Andrew McCarthy, writing at National Review Online's "The Corner," and I think it also summarizes the whole campaign:

We have a disaster here — which is what you should expect when you delegate a non-conservative to make the conservative (nay, the American) case. We can parse it eight ways to Sunday, but I think the commentary is missing the big picture.

Here's what Obama needed to do tonight: Convince the country that he was an utterly safe, conventional, centrist politician who may have leftward leanings but will do the right thing when the crunch comes.

Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left? Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars? Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon? Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites? Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"?

Nope. McCain didn't want to go there. So Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician. Gonna raise your taxes a little, gonna negotiate reasonably with America's enemies; gonna rely on our very talented federal courts to fight terrorists and solve most of America's problems; gonna legalize millions of hard-working illegal immigrants.

McCain? He comes off as Center-Right .. or maybe Center-Left ... but, either way, deeply respectful of Obama despite their policy quibbles.

Great. Memo to McCain Campaign: Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office. You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

If that's what the public thinks, good luck trying to win this thing.

This was way too important an election--and Obama was way too dangerous a potential president--to have left this in the hands of John McCain. I shudder to think at the price the country--and my family--will pay for this mistake.

Wall Street Greed

2008-10-07T15:19:00.004-04:00

An excellent comment from Doug Wilson on the current financial mess, and the role of (and consequences for) greed:

I am preaching on Psalm 49 tomorrow, and I will be going after [the issue of greed]. But whenever politicians go after it, all they do is create regulatory mechanisms for the next round of greedy businessmen to manipulate at will. The very best way to address business greed in the public sector is to insist that the greedists, and those foolish enough to do business with them, be required to eat their own cooking.

Capitalism in good times and safety net socialism in hard times is not capitalism. Capitalism is not riding the bubble until it bursts, and then to suddenly discover the need for government intervention "from time to time." Graspers and grabbers need to be hit a whole lot harder than the Feds will ever hit them. Yeah, greed on Wall St. was a big problem. Let gravity deal with it.

If you were at the casino playing blackjack, and the casino had an unwritten policy of giving you all your money back if you lost your life savings, would you be more likely or less likely to go all-in on that 15 you were dealt?

Proper, capitalistic risk assessment did not cause this catastrophe. Government guaranteed, risk-free speculation did.

Is That Supposed To Be Bad?

2008-10-05T19:51:00.003-04:00

Today Barack Obama accused John McCain of launching "Swift boat-style attacks" on him for pointing out (and thank goodness somebody has) Obama's cozy relationship with unrepentant, America-bombing terrorist Bill Ayers.

I've heard other Democrats use this as a pejorative as well--"Swift-boating." My question is, what do they mean by "Swift boat-style attacks?" I assume they must be referring to the media campaign in the 2004 election by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In case you've forgotten, that was the humongous group of hundreds of veterans who personally served with John Kerry in Vietnam, who witnessed his actions there and pointed out that he was systematically lying about his experiences. How is this somehow a slam against what McCain is doing?

Judging by what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth actually did, I must assume that when Obama accuses McCain of launching "Swift-boat style attacks," what he's actually condemning is "telling the truth about my past, possibly using massive numbers of actual witnesses," since that's precisely what the Swift-boat veterans did with John Kerry.

Democrats have also tried this with the infamous Willie Horton ad that George Bush 41 ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Invocation of the name "Willie Horton" is now supposed to make us gasp with horror at the dirty politics Bush supposedly employed. In reality, Dukakis was running on his supposedly stupendous prison reform program in Massachusetts, and the ad pointed out that part of Dukakis' program involved giving weekend passes from prison to extremely dangerous criminals. One of those criminals was Willie Horton, who'd been convicted of robbery and murder after stabbing a boy 19 times and leaving him to bleed to death in a trash can. Horton had been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for that crime (and Dukakis opposed the death penalty, by the way.) Dukakis "innovative" system gave Horton at least ten weekend passes from prison. While on one of those weekend passes, Horton (not all that surprisingly) broke into the home of a young couple, raping the woman twice and binding, gagging, and stabbing her fiancée. The whole episode lasted over seven hours.

Every single word of the ad was absolutely true (though wildly understated considering the magnitude of the crime), and in reality, the prison furlough program was and is an utter blight on Dukakis' record, certainly disqualifying him as any kind of "justice reformer" as he was trying to claim at the time. So how is it that the phrase "Willie Horton" is now somehow seen as a slam on Bush 41 and Republicans? It ought to stand as a monument to the everlasting shame of liberal notions of criminal rehabilitation.

Incidentally, as far as the supposed "racist" component of the Horton ad, here's a little trivia question: do you know who was the first person to bring up the prison furlough issue against Dukakis? That's right. It was that noted racist Al Gore, running against Dukakis in the Democratic presidential primaries that year.

So instead of somehow being cowed by claims of "Swift-boat attacks," I hope Republicans will have the guts to stand up and say, "Oh, you mean factual attacks in which the truth is told? Where the candidate's proven historical activities and associations are actually brought into the forefront by lots of people with impeccable credentials and the candidate is held responsible for them despite pronounced media silence? Yes, that is exactly what we're doing."

What Else Are You Not Hearing?

2008-10-03T12:32:00.002-04:00

Here's a story published by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics in July, well before the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They give the highest cumulative donations from Freddie and Fannie to political coffers over the last 20 years, from 1989 to 2008.

Of course, this is a bi-partisan problem, as we are continually told. Here are the top four recipients of Fannie and Freddie's political largesse since 1989:

1. Dodd, Christopher J
D-CT
$133,900

2. Kerry, John
D-MA
$111,000

3. Obama, Barack
D-IL
$105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary
D-NY
$75,550

In other words, Barack Obama, after three whole years in the Senate, has had more money showered on him by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than all but two other people in the entire 535-member Congress. Dodd has been in the Senate since 1981 and is the longest-serving senator in Connecticut history. Kerry's been in the Senate since 1985. Obama has nearly equalled both in just three short years of drinking out of the Freddie and Fannie spout.

Hmmm. I wonder how it is that in the middle of a presidential campaign where the primary issue has become a financial catastrophe initiated by the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, nobody in the media seems to mention that on a per-year basis, Barack Obama is more in the pockets of both than any other memeber of Congress by far?

But at least we're getting to the bottom of that important "what magazines does Sarah Palin read?" story.

Foreign Policy Experience

2008-10-01T16:13:00.003-04:00

Regardless of what one thinks of Sarah Palin (and while I'm inclined to like her, I'm waiting for the debate to see if she's got what it takes to lead the country), it's time to put to bed this canard about "foreign policy experience."

Liberals and the media hold up so-called "foreign policy experience" as the Holy Grail of the presidency--except when they're trying to elect someone with absolutely none of it (see: Clinton, Bill). But all that the vaunted "foreign policy experience" really means is "worships at the altar of the U.N. and pays obeisance to the Council on Foreign Relations and the massive State Department bureaucratic apparatus."

The best foreign policy president of my lifetime was Ronald Reagan, and it was always the same knock against him: "no foreign policy experience" (and a governor to boot). I would argue that it was Reagan's very lack of such "experience" that allowed him to win the Cold War, since entanglement in the State Department miasma leads to an utter inability to distinguish good from bad, up from down, and black from white. It's no coincidence that most Secretaries of State are mamby-pamby functionaries so lost in nuance that they can't see what's straight in front of them and almost always wind up unable to even distinguish a dictator from an elected president. They are always the very definition of squishy moderate (or, in some cases, outright Leftist), even if that wasn't the case when they were appointed. Mere proximity to the foreign policy apparatus of the nation turns them into chess players with no moral clarity or big picture. (See Powell, Colin; Albright, Madeleine; Christopher, Warren; Eagleburger, Lawrence; Baker, James; Muskie, Edwin; Vance, Cyrus; Kissinger, Henry; Rogers, William, etc. etc. ad nauseum. There's not one single person on that list I'd want to be president.)

In the modern era, probably the epitome of the "foreign policy experience" president was Richard M. Nixon. He's the one who opened relations back up with the Chicoms (propping that regime up for another 35 years and counting) and established the policy of detente with the Soviet Union (which the State Department functionaries hallowed), a series of endless treaties and maintaining a "balance of power" where the U.S. tacitly agreed to never try to actually win the Cold War. Thankfully, Reagan, who had never been blinkered by the State Department establishment and wasn't crippled by what the liberals called "foreign policy experience" came in with his own policy of "we win, they lose." Needless to say, all hell broke loose among the establishment foreign policy wonks. Every step along the way they whined as this "cowboy" with no foreign policy experience called the Russkies on the carpet, walked out of summits, amped up weapons systems, and ultimately put 'em out of business.

George H.W. Bush was another so-called "foreign policy president" having been CIA director and an ambassador, as well as a former director of the Council on Foreign Relations. A proponent of the so-called "New World Order," he's the one who actually tried to prop the Soviet Union back up at the last minute before their collapse and help Gorbachev maintain his power. He also stopped short in the Gulf War despite the advice of many around him, leaving hundreds of thousands of Kurdish rebels who'd helped us in the war to be exterminated by Saddam Hussein, as well as leaving Saddam in power to be dealt with again later, the repercussions of which we're still dealing with on a daily basis.

So in my estimation, "foreign policy experience" ain't' worth a hill of beans. Give me someone with simple moral clarity a thousand times over the experienced, amoral wonks like Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and the like. This isn't brain surgery; most times all that's required is to know right from wrong.

(Most of these thoughts I first posted the other day over at A Better Country.)

The Peace Of Angels

2008-09-25T16:38:00.007-04:00

I saw this photo and caption at CNN.com from today's bailout hearings:

Rep. Barney Frank speaks today as Sens. Charles Schumer and Christopher Dodd confer. (Getty Images)

Oh yeah, they'll fix it.

A Tour Of The Liberal Heart

2008-09-22T14:59:00.002-04:00

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." -- T.S. Eliot

[HT: Doug Wilson]

Cheap And Unavailable

2008-09-19T10:12:00.004-04:00

Presumably the authors of this story (nor the doltish politicians who trumpet this kind of thing) can see the connection here. From today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel, in a story headlined "Many South Florida gas stations on 'E' as shortages continue":

Despite state officials this week assuring motorists there's an adequate supply of gasoline statewide, scattered gas stations in South Florida on Thursday continued to grapple with shortages in the wake of Hurricane Ike.

And then in a later paragraph:

Last Friday, before Ike struck the Gulf Coast and headed toward Houston's refineries, the wholesale price of gas spiked for many gas retailers. In turn, gas stations quickly increased prices, which triggered a slew of price-gouging complaints in Florida. Earlier this week, state Attorney General Bill McCollum opened an inquiry into the gouging allegations, sending subpoenas to several gas suppliers and dealers.

For what it's worth, lest anyone think I'm a partisan, Bill McCollum is a Republican, as is Governor Charlie Crist. They're also both idiots. Neither has wasted a chance to jump on the air this week to beat his chest over gasoline "price gouging."

But, of course, if the market had been allowed to set the price of gasoline rather than addled politicians doing it, there would be no gas shortage in Florida. Higher prices would've provided more incentive for quickly moving gas to Florida. And higher prices would have encouraged many motorists to merely use enough gas to get to wherever they were going, rather than rushing to fill up the tank with artificially cheap gas. Instead, once again, politicians get to portray themselves as virtuous, holding the line on prices for gasoline that a lot of stations don't actually have.

The good news is, it's cheap. The bad news is, you can't get it.

[For more in the same vein, see my old posts "A Cautious Defense of Price Gouging" and "Hot Gas."]

price gouging gasoline Bill McCollum Charlie Crist Florida Hurricane Ike Sun-Sentinel

Oh, The Humanity

2008-09-17T11:30:00.004-04:00

From what I'm hearing, things are very bleak right now on Texas' decimated gulf coast. Not that I'm hearing much. Doesn't it seem strange that less than five days after an entire American city was virtually wiped out, we're hardly hearing anything about it? We're still getting more coverage of Katrina three years later (witness the media frenzy as Hurricane Hanna was approaching Louisiana a few weeks ago) than we're getting of a current disaster area.

Where is Anderson Cooper crying in the floodwaters and demanding governmental compassion for the victims? His entire career was built on standing around in the Katrina aftermath emoting for the victims, yet I can't even find anything about Hurricane Ike at the website for Anderson's program. Where is Sean Penn in his rowboat and flack jacket?

Could it be that, because Galveston doesn't have a big jazz music community and the kinds of activities that people who listen to NPR consider "cultural," the elites simply don't care? (By the way, I've been to New Orleans. And I can tell you that New Orleans' main "cultural activity" is vomiting elaborate frozen drinks.) Could it be that because there is no rioting and looting in the streets in Texas and nobody is having press conferences demanding that FEMA "do more?" that the press has lost interest? Could it be that because nobody needs to wear a flack jacket, and folks there are simply going about the business of digging out that the media thinks it's boring? Is it possible that there are victims that the media elites thinks are hip, and others they don't really care much for? Might, perhaps, the gulf coast of Texas simply not have the kind of demographic makeup that elicits the pious paternalism of the mainstream media?

I'll look forward to that Hollywood telethon for Galveston that I'm sure will be coming up soon, like the one that was carried on NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, MSNBC, CNBC, BET, and Pax after Katrina. Perhaps noted philanthropist Kanye West can get bailed out long enough to appear on the show and tell us that George W. Bush doesn't care about white people.

Hurricane Ike Galveston Texas gulf coast Sean Penn Anderson Cooper Gulf Coast Hurricane Katrina New Orleans

It's Not Fair Unless You Spot Us More Points

2008-09-12T20:39:00.000-04:00

I predicted some months ago that John McCain would lose in a 40 state landslide. My reasoning was sound--no candidate wins because voters are voting against someone else. They need to be inspired to vote for you, and John McCain inspires virtually nobody. I didn't know a single person who was jazzed about McCain's candidacy. The best reaction I got from anyone was, "I guess I'll vote for him. He's the lesser of two evils." But Sarah Palin has proved to be a complete game-changer. In my opinion, neither McCain nor his team could have been smart enough to foresee the ultimate reaction to her. They decided to poke a hole and ended up hitting a gusher. Nobody still is inspired by McCain. That remains true. But it turns out that a whole bunch of people are being inspired by Sarah Palin.

As a result, liberals are now starting to wring their hands about a possible Obama loss. One recent example that caught my eye is from that Harvard political scientist and Brookings Institution Fellow Adam McKay (perhaps better known as the director of the avant-garde art house films "Anchorman" and "Talladega Nights.") As Glenn Beck likes to say, reading this will make blood shoot out of your eyes. Writing in the Huffington Post (warning: there's some salty language in the article, despite McKay's normally patrician sensibilities), McKay sputters:

Something is not right. We have a terrific candidate and a terrific VP candidate. We're coming off the worst eight years in our country's history. Six of those eight years the Congress, White House and even the Supreme Court were controlled by the Republicans and the last two years the R's have filibustered like tantrum throwing 4-year-olds, yet we're going to elect a Republican who voted with that leadership 90% of the time and a former sportscaster who wants to teach Adam and Eve as science? That's not odd as a difference of opinion, that's logically and mathematically queer.

....So what is this house advantage the Republicans have? It's the press. There is no more fourth estate. Wait, hold on...I'm not going down some esoteric path with theories on the deregulation of the media and corporate bias and CNN versus Fox...I mean it: there is no more functioning press in this country. And without a real press the corporate and religious Republicans can lie all they want and get away with it.

One wonders what it would actually take to get Barack Obama elected if they don't feel that they can do it now. All of the major networks have been completely in his pocket for several years now (just ask Hillary Clinton's supporters), he's received almost no questioning over his questionable personal associations (like Tony Rezko and Bill Ayers), and he has an entire cable news network (MSNBC) entirely devoted to annointing him the new Messiah. And still liberals think it's not enough.

In 2004, Newsweek's Evan Thomas (a liberal; his grandfather was Socialist Party of America leader Norman Thomas) said, "The media, I think, want [John] Kerry to win...that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." Of course, Kerry still lost, and one wonders how wide the margin would have been had he not had the media doing his bidding 24/7 heading into the election. Now ask yourself this: is the media less supportive of Obama than they were of Kerry, or more?

The fact that polls are even showing this thing as close are utterly astounding. You have a clearly charismatic candidate running against a 73-year-old personality hole, at a time when the incumbent president is one of the least popular in history, with a declining economy, an unpopular war, and the entire apparatus of the mainstream media and entertainment industry behind him, and he's tied--at best.

I don't know whether it's sad or amusing, but how much more clear could it be that the reason these people don't seem to be able to win national elections is that they live in a parallel universe? In this universe, the wall to wall media worship of Obama somehow isn't pro-Obama enough, and their man would run away with it if somehow he could just get some good coverage. It couldn't be that the American people have utterly rejected, time and time again, the "progressive" vision.

John McCain Sarah Palin Barack Obama media bias Huffington Post Adam McKay Tony Rezko Bill Ayers Evan Thomas

Cloak And Dagger

2008-09-12T10:02:00.000-04:00

Read this little line from TIME Magazine a couple or twenty times and see if you can get your mind around it:

Her daughter's pregnancy is beyond her control, but the fact that she did not inform McCain's team about it until a day before he offered her the job has chagrined even her Republican backers.

In other words, TIME magazine sees potential scandal in the fact that Sarah Palin only told the McCain campaign about her daughter's pregnancy when they came to talk to her about being on the ticket, after which McCain, who knew all the facts, then went ahead and named her the veep candidate.

It's an outrage! As we all know, telling them about the situation before the nomination--when they actually approached her--isn't enough. Three months ago, she was supposed to send a postcard to the McCain campaign announcing that the rabbit had died, just in case they were interested.

Of course, this is TIME simply making stuff up. There are no "Republican backers" who are "chagrined" that Palin fully disclosed the situation to McCain when things got serious. I haven't talked to a single human being who has been miffed about the internal timing of Palin's notifying McCain of the pregnancy. Notifying him the day after the nomination is a problem. Notifying him the before the fact is how it's supposed to....oh, forget it. I can't even finish this paragraph. This is utter idiocy.

Bristoling With Fairness

2008-09-11T12:27:00.000-04:00

Pointing out liberal media bias is so easy it's almost not even fun anymore. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, or winning a stuffed animal by guessing the over/under on Ann Wilson's weight. (Hint: always take the over.)

Nonetheless, certain blatant incidents of it still need to be pointed out, if for no other reason than that it acts as an encouragement for all of America outside of New York and D.C. to keep the mute button on.

We live in a country where we now know (and knew within a couple of days) every possible detail about Sarah Palin's daughter, her daughter's pregnancy, the boyfriend of the daughter (even the guy running out into the street to wash your windshield can tell you that his name is Levi and he plays hockey), and even the scurrilous rumors that Sarah Palin's baby was actually her daughter's. (Incidentally, this sounds about like how a liberal would conceive a cover-up: Sarah Palin will cover for her pregnant daughter by pretending the baby is actually hers, while simultaneously announcing to the world that her daughter is pregnant. Why, it's brilliant! I see the maleficent, plotting genius of the Bush years will be continuing through a McCain presidency.)

But while we know every detail of 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, virtually no mainstream news organization is willing to ask any questions at all about the Muslim school Barack Obama attended in Indonesia (unless, of course, it's to quickly jump in to say, "No, it's not as bad as you think! There was no actual dynamiting taking place!). Of course, there was actual dynamiting taking place with Obama's friend William Ayers, yet the only questions asked him about the Ayers association have come from Bill O'Reilly and the hated Fox News. Have you seen Bill Ayers on the cover of people magazine or on the front page of your local newspaper lately? Why would you? He's only a self-identified communist and one of the leaders of the Weathermen who participated in terrorist bombings in the U.S.--and is a guy with whom Obama has a longstanding friendship. Ayers was quoted in the New York Times (on September 11th, 2001, no less, if you can believe that) as saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." This is a friend of Barack Obama's.

Keep in mind, Obama is his party's presidential candidate. Bristol Palin is the daughter of the other party's vice-presidential candidate. Yet how much would you say you know about Barack Obama's formative years, or the friends he keeps, that you learned in the mainstream media? How many of you could pick Barack Obama's friend Bill Ayers out of a lineup?

And, of course, as my friend Brad points out, none of this is even to mention the fact that the media sat on the John Edwards love child story for nearly a year, including while he was still a viable, active presidential candidate.

Barack Obama Sarah Palin Bristol Palin William Ayers media bias Weathermen John Edwards

What To Make Of It All?

2008-09-10T17:34:00.003-04:00

The fact that Sarah Palin is a woman and a mother has drawn questions from both the political Left and the Right. Of course, the questions from the Left cannot be taken seriously on this; the utter, disingenuous hypocricy of liberals asking, "But how will she take care of little Trig?" is nothing but risible. The fact that she didn't have his brain sucked out of his body already puts Mrs. Palin up 1-0 over the liberals in the Caring About Trig department.

On the right (particularly among Christian conservatives), the questions are more pressing and thoughtful, and deserve real answers. If you're interested in that question from a biblical perspective, I've found some of the things Doug Wilson has written over the last few days to be enormously helpful.

From a piece listing some of the pros and cons, Wilson writes from the con side:

One of the central lies of pop feminism has been the enticing fiction that "you can have it all." You can have a thriving family, and a career in academic physics, and be a sexpot, and have a fascinating and exciting life with numerous parties to go to, just like in the movies. In fact, just like in the movies -- because the movies have been celluoid shills for the pop feminists on this one. You can do anything you want in the movies, and to generate this impression you don't even need special effects. But it ain't true in real life, as numerous women have discovered....[W]hen the false promises of feminism are set before young girls, quite a few of them can seriously screw up their lives, and in the last go around with feminism, quite a few of them did. So put this con under the heading of role model problems.

He also lists quite a few "pros," including:

File this next one under the heading of "husbands of accomplished babes." I speak as an expert here. Feminism is not the only heterodox gender-idea we have to deal with. There is a significant stream within conservative Christian circles that is more Muslim than Christian. In my writing on family, I have called this error masculinism, the counterpart to feminism. This selection of Sarah Palin enables us to address that problem. The Bible does not teach that a woman's place is in the home. It teaches that a woman's priority is the home. If a woman accomplishes a great deal outside the home without surrendering the priority of the home, there is nothing whatever unbiblical about it.

This post caught me by surprise, and actually made me choke up (if you can believe that coming from your grizzled, emotionless correspondent).

And this post is also essential reading from a biblical perspective. This situation offers Christians a real, beautiful occasion for some thinking. What a great chance to build a more biblical worldview. Let's not let it slip away.

Sarah Palin Doug Wilson

Heart Doesn't Heart Sarah Palin

2008-09-10T12:22:00.005-04:00

One of the traditional rituals of the election season is some old classic rock song being used by a Republican candidate, followed by the old, grizzled, nearly forgotten performer of said classic rock song coming out of the woodwork to demand that the candidate stop using it since he/she hates the candidate and the candidate's conservative politics. (See: Tom Scholz, John Cougar Mellencamp, Jackson Browne Mellencamp, Bruce Cougar Springsteen nearly every year, et. al. ad nauseaum.)

This year, someone decided to play the old Heart song "Barricuda" at the Republican National Convention because apparently Sarah Palin's high school basketball playing nickname was "Sarah Barracuda." Predictably, within about 10 minutes, sisters Ann (see photo above) and Nancy Wilson halted their between-puppet-shows set at Six Flags to demand that the Republicans stop using the song, and to announce that Sarah Palin does not speak for American women.

This leads me to wish to say to "Barracuda" singer Ann Wilson: have another pork chop. And be glad anyone is still listening to your song.

Back From Vacation

2008-09-10T11:51:00.000-04:00

Man, did I pick a bad time to go away. Anything happen while I was gone?

So much to post about, so little time. Hopefully we can get caught up on a few things this week.

Veepstakes

2008-08-29T13:34:00.002-04:00

On the Palin pick: the short answer is, I like it.

McCain is a terrible candidate. He at least needed a running mate who wouldn't hurt him with conservatives. She doesn't. And she's far easier on the eyes than Joe Lieberman.

Hey, it's only the veep. But as veeps go, I think Sarah Palin is an inspired choice. And Joe Biden...um...isn't. It gives McCain some "new and fresh" zing that he deseperately needs. For the moment, I'm still standing by my prediction that McCain will get slaughtered. He's just a terrible, terrible choice (see link above). But it's getting more interesting.

On another note, if I'm Joe Biden, I think I'm going ahead and punching Barack Obama after this kiss.

Huh. Weird.

2008-08-27T13:37:00.002-04:00

O b a m a - B i d e n

O s a m a - Bin Laden

I'm just saying. Visually, you have to admit it's odd.

Do You Have John Edwards In The Can?

2008-08-08T16:19:00.004-04:00

Well, I see that John Edwards, finally feeling the weight of public pressure after Rabe Ramblings blew the lid off his illegitimate child scandal yesterday (okay, maybe there were some other people reporting it too), has now admitted an affair with Rielle Hunter, but insists he's not the baby's father.

So let's think this through a little bit.

First, the media. Will they admit now that they were utterly wrong all along to be suppressing this story? It's the headline story at every media outlet right now--even the Los Angeles Times. Will they apologize to the National Enquirer? Why did Edwards find the allegations compelling enough to respond to, while the media didn't even find them compelling enough to report in most cases?

Second, what about baby-faced liar John Edwards? He denied the affair for months and now admits he was lying the whole time. But he claims the child is not his. Is he lying again? The evidence is strong that he is. Edwards claims that the baby could not be his because the math doesn't work out with the baby's birth on February 27, 2008. He says the affair ended before he could have been the father. He also, according to ABC, made a special point of saying that the affair took place before his wife's cancer recurrence.

Elizabeth Edwards' cancer reoccurred in March 2007. Assuming normal gestation, this child would have been conceived in May 2007. If that child belongs to John Edwards, he's the world's biggest cad, and as a politician he knows this. It's over for him. So he claims that the affair ended in 2006. That's convenient if it's true. Yes, it makes him a jerk who cheated on his wife, but at least he's not a complete jerk who cheated on his dying wife.

But does that claim withstand even a moment's scrutiny? If the affair ended in 2006 as he claims, why was John Edwards in his "former" mistress's hotel room at 2am a couple of weeks ago, which he now admits? Why was he photographed in his former mistress's hotel room holding some other guy's baby? Why didn't his wife know about it, as he also admits to ABC? And if it's important to him that we know his wife didn't have terminal cancer when he had the affair, did she have less terminal cancer when he decided to visit his former mistress in California last month?

And perhaps the biggest question: as a trial lawyer worth tens of millions of dollars, is this really the best this clown can come up with?

UPDATE (5:31pm): Edwards has now released a public statement. It's a lot of fun. Here's a sampling:

Although I was honest in every painful detail with my family, I did not tell the public. When a supermarket tabloid told a version of the story, I used the fact that the story contained many falsities to deny it. But being 99% honest is no longer enough.

Get it? John Edwards is 99% honest! Why, that's almost perfectly honest! The only thing he lied about was cheating on his dying wife. He's only a little bit of a liar. 99% honest is a wonderful thing. Is that kind of like how his mistress was only a little pregnant?

In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.

Gee, you don't say. I think that comes as a stunning surprise to all of us. How much did that haircut cost again?

If you want to beat me up – feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself.

Oh, I'll bet I can. Self pity is a nice note to strike when you've just been busted cheating on your dying wife and lying about it, though. And his statement still contains no explanation for why he was in Rielle Hunter's hotel room 2:40am only 2 1/2 weeks ago if the affair ended in 2006, and he says he will answer no more questions on the issue.

Well, I beg to differ, because I think the missus is going to have quite a few questions. "No, honest, honey. I broke it off two years ago, just like I told you then."

John Edwards Rielle Hunter illegitimate child media silence baby-faced liar

Radio (And TV And Print) Silence

2008-08-07T12:17:00.005-04:00

I saw a hilarious ad on television the other day from Media Matters, the leftwing organization devoted to discovering conservative bias in the media. They were making the claim that....wait for it....the mainstream media was favoring John McCain over Barack Obama. But for the rest of us who are not experiencing feverish delusions, can there still be any doubt about the pronounced leftward bias of the media?

For the vast majority, this issue was settled long ago. But if there are still any holdouts, I offer to you as irrefutable proof, the mainstream media's utterly astounding handling of the story about John Edwards' illegitimate child. That is to say, they haven't handled it. At all. And yet, Edwards has been busted dead to rights.

Of course, the MSM's excuse is that the story was originally broken by the National Enquirer and so, they sniff, it's not worthy of them. The only problem is, whether it was the Enquirer or not, the story is, by all appearances, actually true. Former (and possibly future) vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who was one of the three major Democratic presidential candidates, whose wife is terminally ill with cancer, has apparently fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman named Rielle Hunter. He even allowed a political crony to take the blame for him last December when the story first started dribbling out. Yet the story is utterly ignored by the mainstream media.

Let's imagine for a moment. Imagine that it's Dick Cheney. Or Mike Huckabee. Or Mitt Romney. Or any of a hundred other Republicans. Does the media hold back on the story? Do we not even see any of the "we're not reporting it as true, we're reporting it as something people are talking about" or the "can you believe this horrible smear campaign?" stories they've become famous for? Not a chance.

So why the total media blackout? The L.A. Times even ordered its reporters not to blog on the subject. Slate magazine is among the few liberal outlets arguing for sanity.

John Edwards Rielle Hunter illegitimate child media silence

Eating The Eggs While Killing The Chicken

2008-08-04T16:15:00.002-04:00

I noticed in Slate that Christopher Hitchens has written an appreciation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer (who died over the weekend) who exposed the atrocities of the Soviet gulag in the 20th century. Of course, Solzhenitsyn was a great man and a true hero. But there's an irony in Hitchen's eulogy. He writes:

This is a kind of fortitude for which we do not have any facile name. The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived "as if." Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on "as if" he were a free citizen, "as if" he had the right to study his own country's history, "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity.

The irony is that these "as ifs" were produced by Solzhenitsyn's strong Christian faith. Hitchens' belief system not only has no basis for producing such behavior, but none for even consistently praising it. Hitchens, in his radical atheism, believes that human life is nothing but the product of energy, time, and chance. We are, at bottom, nothing more than atoms banging together. Yet he lauds Solzhenitsyn for living "as if" there were such a thing as human dignity. If Hitchens believes there is such a thing, he didn't get that from his atheism--and is actually being inconsistent with it.

The irony is that, while Hitchens commends Solzhenitsyn's stand against the gulag, it was the gulag that was produced by Hitchens' atheism. Solzhenitsyn's stand on human dignity was produced by the Christianity that Hitchens hates, which views people not only as if they had inherent value, but as actually having it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Christopher Hitchens

The IOC: On The Case!

2008-07-24T14:24:00.002-04:00

From CNN.com:

The International Olympic Committee has banned Iraq from competing in the upcoming Summer Olympics because of what it says is the government's political interference in sports.

CNN received a copy of the letter, which was sent to Jassim Mohammed Jaffer, Iraqi minister of youth and sports, and Ali Mohsen Ismail, acting secretary general of the Iraqi general secretariat of the Council of Ministers.

"We deeply regret this outcome, which severely harms the Iraqi Olympic and Sports Movement and the Iraqi athletes, but which is unfortunately imposed by the circumstances," said the letter, signed by two IOC officials.

It's good that now the IOC is cracking down on government interference with the Iraqi Olympic team. As opposed to back when when the IOC used to allow them to participate, when the late Uday Hussein was running things for the Iraqi Olympic Committe:

As president of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee, Uday allegedly tortures athletes for losing games. He sticks them in prison for days or months at a time. Has them beaten with iron bars. Caned on the soles of their feet. Chained to walls and left to stay in contorted positions for days. Dragged on pavement until their backs are bloody, then dunked in sewage to ensure the wounds become infected. If Uday stops by a player's jail cell, he might urinate on his bowed, shaven head. Just to humiliate him.

And, of course, the IOC has scheduled this years games for that bastion of governmental non-interference, China. Way to stay on it, IOC. The world rests a little better because of your vigilance.

(Undoubtedly, however, this little Iraq problem can go away if some moolah finds it's way into the right hands. For more on the utter sham that is the bribe-hungry International Olympic Committe, go here.)

Bush Kills A Poor Guy

2008-07-23T15:54:00.002-04:00

The odd story of a burglar who got stuck in a ventilation shaft in a sports bar trying to make his way in after closing hours--presumably to clean out the cash register--has been in the news here in South Florida.

I'll let the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, in a story that has to be read to be believed, take it from there:

The man, identified Monday as Benjamin Rodriguez, 46 and homeless, had been dead up to 72 hours before his body was discovered Saturday, according to officials and state records. He was found upside down in the shaft, with his arms at his sides, according to the Broward Medical Examiner's Office.

His death left people wondering why anyone would take such a dangerous route, and if perhaps this is a reaction to a rough economy.

This seemed to me about the oddest possible angle somebody could put on this story. But the Sun-Sentinel's account offers opinions aplenty:

"That's crazy. It sounds like a horror movie," said Estefania Nevial, an accountant's assistant in the strip mall just south of Mayo Street. "I couldn't believe it. I guess that's how desperate people are."

I guess so. The bad economy forced him to climb down a ventilation shaft to try to rob a bar. Local officals agree:

"Desperate times bring desperate measures," Hollywood fire-rescue spokesman Battalion Chief Mark Steele said. "People will do anything right now. We're seeing a lot of weird calls. Every day you jump on that truck you're going to see something different."

Ventilation man was suddenly forced into a life of crime by the economic downturn. We want change! We want change! Barack Obama certainly wouldn't have let this man die. In order to save these people, we clearly need change to get us out of this sluggish economy perpetrated by the Evil Bush.

Almost as a footnote, the story adds:

Florida criminal records show Rodriguez has been arrested 22 times on various drug possession-related, theft and criminal traffic charges dating back to 1991. His most recent arrest was in June, when the Broward Sheriff's Office picked him up on a warrant charging grand theft, resisting a law enforcement officer and traffic violations.

Huh. That's one long, crazy, burglary-inducing recession.

Revered By Whom?

2008-07-11T15:31:00.003-04:00

In all the furor surrounding Jesse Jackson's recent overheard comments about Barack Obama, the thing being largely ignored is the thing I find most offensive: this clown is supposed to be a minister.

Of course, as with his friend/rival Al Sharpton, we all know that the title "Reverend" is just a fig-leaf cover for his real work, which is race-baiting and hucksterism. If there were any holdouts on the issue of Jackson's piety, I think they were pretty conclusively dislodged earlier this decade by the news of his illegitimate child. (Though to his credit, Jackson was embarrassed enough about the incident that he announced he was dropping out of public life for a period of time, which ended up being exactly one weekend.)

Nonetheless, it's unseemly for someone who claims to be a preacher of the gospel to be speaking this way. In reality, the only "gospel" Jackson is selling is the good news that a corporation that it will not be boycotted if it pays him hush money. Theologically, Jackson is not a Christian. As a graduate (though he never completed the work and was awarded the degree in 2000 because of "life experiences") of the Chicago Theological Seminary (which recently launched it's Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Queer Religious Studies Center), Jackson holds to a liberal theology that, as the scholar J. Gresham Machen pointed out, is an altogether different religion from Christianity, despite stealing some terminology.

So I shouldn't be surprised. Jackson's not about Jesus. He's about Jesse.

The "Pregnant Man"

2008-07-09T14:39:00.003-04:00

Undoubtedly, you've heard the story the media has been relentlessly hyping about the so-called “pregnant man.” "Thomas Beatie," has made the rounds of the tabloids, gossip shows, cable news networks, and predictably enough, Oprah. Some have even called it a miracle.

But since people rarely read past headlines, I've found there to be some confusion on the matter among many folks. Is a man miraculously pregnant?

Well, not quite. The fact is, Beatie was born as--and lived 24 years as--a female named Tracy LaGondino. She did modeling work, and was even a finalist in the Miss Hawaii Teen USA pageant. When she decided she wanted to be a man, she had some cosmetic surgery and took some male hormones. But as even Beatie herself told Oprah, “I opted not to do anything with my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day.” In other words, biologically this person is female, and still capable of carrying a baby, just as she was designed.

What we’re seeing here is not a result of some confounding medical phenomenon, but rather the outworking of silly "social science" programs that have been darkening college campuses for years. In such programs, originally instigated by the feminist movement, there is a push to separate the concept of gender from biological sex. In this view, while sex is biologically determined, gender is not, but rather is a social identity we choose for ourselves. Some choose one gender, some choose another, and some change their minds. Whatever you decide you are is what you are, and none of it is tied to your biological makeup or immutable.

While such ideas might make sense in the halls of addled university gender studies departments (and in fact, it's actually a lot of fun to Google "gender studies programs" and just look at the bios for faculty at the schools that pop up, where you'll never see a more hilarious stew of pseudo-scholarship and pretense), most people still tend to know better. According to a Reuters story, “The couple said an earlier attempt at pregnancy failed when he developed a tubal pregnancy, resulting in surgery that removed his Fallopian tubes.” The story went on to say that Beatie was artificially inseminated.

However somebody wishes to identify themselves, only confused reporters and gender studies professors would call someone a "man" who has Fallopian tubes, a womb, can be inseminated, and is pregnant. The fact that Thomas Beatie calls herself a man doesn’t make it so, because male and female are not simply arbitrary identities we can shed at will. There’s no miracle here, and there’s no medical mystery. It’s simply the normal pregnancy of a gal who likes to dress up and identify herself as a man.

Kill And Eat

2008-07-08T15:34:00.004-04:00

I've noticed with passing interest the phenomenon among my fellow evangelicals of adopting fad diets that market themselves as somehow being "biblical." Certain authors (not to mention "Christian" chiropractors and dieticians) have made a mint putting Christians back under the Old Covenant law.

The unexamined assumption here, almost universally believed, is that God gave Israel the dietary laws primarily for health reasons. But such a view of the law is not sustainable by the text. As if God somehow wanted to take away these health blessings from the church when He pronounced all foods clean again in Acts 10:15.

Nonetheless, such diets have found a fertile market among food-phobic evangelicals. In a fascinating ongoing series, Doug Wilson looks at how we got that way and why it's wrong. Start at the bottom and read up.

On The Death of a Friend, 25 Years Later

2008-07-03T12:42:00.002-04:00

My next-door-neighbor was a year and a half older than I was, and we had known each other since I was a toddler. Sometimes with my wife and kids, I look at the grainy Super 8 movies my parents used to take. There we are, two preschoolers sitting in a little plastic wading pool on the patio. There he is pulling me around in my old red Radio Flyer wagon, both of us decked out in godawful early '70's attire. I think he's actually wearing white shoes and a white belt. What were our parents thinking? There we are at my seventh birthday party. There he is, about to enter high school, playing with my new puppy.

Looking at it now, a 19-month age difference isn't much, but it seemed like a lot at the time. Richie was older, seemed to know the ways of the world, and was willing to grab my hand and guide me through the maze like a big brother. He showed me where my classroom was on the first day of first grade, and did it again on the first day of middle school. He gave me my first exposure to Billy Joel and Steve Martin records (smuggled out of his older brother's bedroom). He interceded with a bullying classmate of his to leave me alone. Though it's virtually unthinkable to me now, I applied to, was accepted at, and nearly attended an all-boys Jesuit high school simply because Rich was a student there.

In St. Louis, you grow up a baseball fan. You play baseball, you watch it, you listen to it, you talk about it, and back then you collected the cards that went with it. Rich was of Lebanese and Syrian descent, so he was quite a haggler. My mom would take us to baseball card shows (hey, we were really into it), and I would watch in a combination of disbelief and envy as this 14-year-old kid would begin bartering with these grizzled baseball card dealers. "How much is the Mickey Mantle?" "Fifteen bucks." "Okay, how 'bout this? I'll give you ten for both the Mantle and the Mays." This would be followed by the dealer laughing a "you're crazy" laugh and Richie heading off undaunted to the next table.

One day he came over and told me he had something to show me. We went back over to his house, where he produced a 1954 Bowman Ted Williams card that he'd bought from some poor sap at a yard sale for about a dollar. I think the market value at the time was something like $600. He also had what appeared to be the hat first baseman Keith Hernandez was wearing when the Cardinals clinched the 1982 World Series. It's provenance was complicated, but in the on-field scrum after the victory (this was back when everyone would rush onto the field after big game like that), somebody grabbed Hernandez's cap with the number 37 written right there under the brim, and somehow (I told you he was a haggler) it ended up in Rich's possession. He also did the first Mike Shannon impression I ever heard. In St. Louis now, everybody does a Mike Shannon impression, but in the early 80's it was revolutionary.

Rich's family had a little, yappy schnauzer named Tuppins. (I have since come to assume that the name came from that Julie Andrews song in "Mary Poppins," but I never thought to ask. Come to think of it, I suddenly recall being really impressed at about five years old that Richie was able to sing the part of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" where they sing it backwards. Big time stuff for the preschool set.) He'd make the reluctant and fearful Tuppins play goalie in garage hockey games, facing a barrage of plastic pucks. Rich also had a hamster named Harbey (and no, that's not a misprint--it was Harbey with a "b". Again, I never figured out why, and never thought to ask.) By hamster standards, Harbey was virtually immortal. He lived in this huge, labyrinthine Habitrail in Richie's room, and I'd swear that hamster lived to be like eight years old.

On July 3, 1983, my childhood ended. It sounds narcisstic to put it that way, and I don't mean it to. The end of my childhood isn't the main point, and 14 is about time to start growing up anyway. But I also can't seem to separate the events of that day from how they affected me and how much everything changed. That was the day Richie died. It was a boating accident. I never got all of the details and it seemed to morbid to ask, but apparently on a family Fourth of July weekend trip at a Missouri lake, some friends of his were goofing around in a motor boat and the motor caught Rich's life jacket and pulled him under and hit him in the head.

It happens to different people at different points, but that was the day when I realized that the carefree summer vacation days of childhood are a mirage. For the first time, it truly dawned on me that death was real, that you never know what a day might hold, that some things are gravely serious, and that life is incredibly, terrifyingly fragile. For the first time, I came face to face with the reality that none of us gets out of here alive. And for the first time I came to know that dull throbbing of loss deep within the gut that lasts until you fall asleep and then hits again like a wave seconds after you wake up. Over the years, that grief has gotten less and less, of course. But if I stop and look for it, I can always find a little piece of it still there.

Richard John Kilo was 16 years old when he died. He's now been gone far longer than he was here. His parents, thankfully, are still around, and they stay in touch with my folks back in St. Louis, though they moved out of the neighborhood a few years after Richie's death. They were, and remain, a wondeful, loving, warm, inviting family. My mom told me the other day that they'd called her after watching the thing I did on C-SPAN a few weeks back and said kind things.

I remember in the horrible, agonizing days immediately following Richie's death, his mom would ask his friends--even beg them--to please never forget him. I can imagine her fear that, with her son only now being here in memory, his friends would grow up, have careers and wives and kids, and lose those memories which would seem to make Rich's short time here a little less real. I was 14 then; I'll turn 40 later this year. I guess this is just a way of saying: I won't forget. I never do.

Richard John Kilo, May 26, 1967 - July 3, 1983.

Around The Horn

2008-06-27T17:51:00.002-04:00

Some links for the weekend:

Maybe everybody else already knew about this, but I just discovered this amazing site where you can watch episodes of classic and current television shows (like "Hill Street Blues," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "The Office") as well as movies (like "Raising Arizona," "The Jerk," and "The Usual Suspects").

Salon offers this complete de-pantsing of Keith Olbermann, who spent ten minutes on his program in January comparing President Bush to the Third Reich for wanting to amend the Foreign Intelligence Survellience Act (FISA) to give telcomm companies retroactive immunity for warrentless surveillance conducted under presidential authority. When Barack Obama said the other day that he also thought maybe it was a good idea, Olbermann turned out to be all for it. But while Salon strips Olbermann bare, at least they leave his toupee largely intact.

Jonah Goldberg at NRO must have read my blog yesterday. His piece on the Supreme Court nails it, saying, "Today, that despot has a name. It’s Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy rules — thanks to his status as the court’s swing vote — as the true King of America." Commenting on the despicable act committed by President Bush--who is sworn to defend and uphold the Constitution--in signing McCain-Feingold while admitting the unconstitutionality of it, Goldberg also writes:
Aside from a legalistic-yet-lawless despotism that makes the meaning of our Constitution hinge on how much fiber Justice Kennedy’s diet has on a particular day, the result of this pathetic state of affairs is that the first branch of government doesn’t take itself seriously.

Mona Charen is equally excellent, writing:
In fact, when you consider that the court is pretty well divided between four liberals and four conservatives with Justice Kennedy swinging from one side to another as the spirit moves him, we now enjoy a Republic of Kennedy. All this fuss and bother about the presidential race is misplaced. The most powerful man in the land is someone most Americans couldn’t pick out of a lineup.

Canada's National Post points out a difficult but obvious Canadian truth: Mike Myers just isn't funny anymore, and hasn't been for some time.

Have a great weekend, and don't kill each other stampeding into the theater for that new Pixar film, "We Print Our Own Money Now."

Keith Olbermann Salon Keith Olbermann's toupee Jonah Goldberg Mona Charen NRO Anthony Kennedy Supreme Court Mike Myers

The King And I

2008-06-26T10:58:00.004-04:00

So I see that the United States Supreme Court has narrowly decided to allow us to keep the Second Amendment for at least a little while longer, with King Anthony once again the swing vote in a 5-4 decision.

While I'm glad the Court got this one right, it should be noted that they have absolutely no authority anyway to strike down one of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and so regardless of what they might have decided, the right would still exist. The notion that we would be having to wait, 219 years after the ratification of the Constitution, for a court to tell us whether the Second Amendment will remain operative is absurd, and it's reminiscent of the kind of monarchy from which the nation's founders were trying to extricate themselves.

Because we are a nation of laws rather than men, and because the supreme law of the land is the Constitution, citizens would be not only have been right, but even obligated to disobey the Court's ruling had it gone the other direction. Ironically, the very purpose of the amendment was to prevent a tyrant from waving away our rights on a whim, which the Court was one swishy (as usually) Anthony Kennedy vote away from trying to do.

Because the Court has chosen to insert itself in all the major political battles of the day and rule by fiat (with the help of the liberal advocacy groups that decided the democratic process wasn't going their way in the 20th century), one unelected man--Anthony Kennedy--is now the most powerful person in the land. Whichever way the wind happens to blow the famously vascillating Justice Kennedy is the way our constitutional rights go that day. Today the wind was blowing in a good direction. Tomorrow it may not be. Such a setup, of course, makes an utter mockery of the Constitution, a situation that's not changed when Kennedy follows the broken clock rule and happens to get a decision right.

Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy Second Amendment

Around The Horn

2008-06-20T14:45:00.002-04:00

Some links for a Monday afternoon:

My fellow evangelicals tend to think that the core message one is trying to communicate is one thing and the form that message takes is entirely another. But while Marshall McLuhan may have overstated it with his maxim "the medium is the message," it becomes more and more clear that the medium affects the message in powerful ways. This must-read article in the Atlantic Monthly wonders if the Internet, which admittedly contains a wealth of wonderful and helpful information, might be entirely rewiring the way we think. (HT: Carl Trueman)

King Kaufman of Salon takes a specialized look back at the late George Carlin's work particularly dealing with sports. (And of course beware of Carlin's normal R-rated, frequently blasphemous language.) As a former sports talk host, I found Carlin's contributions to the never-ending, time-killing "sport/not-a-sport" discussion were invaluable. My favorites: "Swimming isn't a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning." And also, "Tennis isn't a sport. Tennis is just ping pong standing on the table."

Speaking of sports talk radio, it looks like the premiere duo in the genre might be breaking up.

Is it just me, or does the mainstream media seem to be studiously avoiding questioning Barack Obama's sketchy relationship with Islam earlier in life? Oh, I guess it's not just me. The outstanding journalist Melanie Phillips wonders about it too.

Comic actress Dodie Goodman has died. Raising the question, Dodie Goodman was still alive? I felt similarly last week after hearing that Cyd Charisse had died.

...Like Church Bells

2008-06-19T11:21:00.003-04:00

Today's Chutzpah Award goes to South Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-Embarrassment). He says in today's Sun-Sentinel that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should be impeached, adding that they "should not only be impeached, they ought to be jailed for what they did to this nation."

And of course, Alcee would know, having been himself impeached and convicted by the U.S. Senate as a federal judge in 1989 for soliciting a $150,000 bribe. He became only the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate.

Alcee Hastings impeachment

U2, President Bush?

2008-06-18T17:29:00.002-04:00

Now that my kids are at the age when they've become far more internet savvy than I am, they direct my attention to things I'd never have found on my own. Lately, they've pointed me to some unusual videos, like this oddly hypnotic clip of George W. Bush doing the U2 song, "Sunday Bloody Sunday." It starts out amusing, and then becomes transfixing. Somebody spent months editing this thing. It has to be seen to be believed.

He Liked Me, He Really Liked Me

2008-06-17T11:50:00.003-04:00

One of the sad television spectacles of this past weekend was Keith Olbermann's desperate, ongoing attempt to hitch himself to the Tim Russert wagon, as if the two were so close that he was in the habit of sitting between Russert and Russert's son at Buffalo Bisons ballgames.

But one column reminds us today that only days before his death, Russert was actually distancing himself from Olbermann. The column cites a New Yorker profile of Olbermann which chronicles the incredibly long string of former colleagues who utterly hate the guy. Indeed, long before he became the host of "Pravda" (or whatever they call it) on MSNBC, Olbermann was primarily known in my former industry of sportscasting as a pompous, utter tool who usually got fired from jobs in six months.

Anyway, in the New Yorker story, Olbermann's close, personal friend, confidant, and mentor Tim Russert is quoted as saying, "What cable emphasizes, more and more, is opinion, or even advocacy. Whether it’s Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann or Lou Dobbs, that’s what that particular platform or venue does. It’s not what I do."

The article also makes clear that Tom Brokaw thinks Olbermann is a nutcase who's a long-term detriment to NBC's news division. Whether or not Olbermann's on-air behavior is a detriment to NBC, I'll leave to others. But I will say this: the guy's toupee definitely is a detriment.

Keith Olbermann Tim Russert Keith Olbermann's toupee

Just One More Russert Story

2008-06-16T16:49:00.004-04:00

A lot has been said about Tim Russert in the 72 hours since his sudden death. Though he was obviously well-loved, and though I considered him by far to be the best and the fairest of the mainstream media interviewers, after the first few hours following the stunning news, I began to find many of the reminiscences repetitive and a little bland. Nice guy. Loved Buffalo. Loved what he did. Loved his family.

But this morning, one stood out to me for some reason. I found myself touched by the sweet rememberance of former NBC News president Michael Gartner, the man who pushed Russert out from the backstage shadows of NBC into the limelight. In all the stories over this weekend, this is one I hadn't seen told.

Finally, I told him he should be – had to be – the moderator of Meet the Press, which wasn't doing well.

"No way," he said again.

We argued. We debated. We fought. He raised objections, I shot them down. At the end, he said, "Look, I can't do it. I'm ugly." "Well, I said with a laugh, I can't argue that one (he had a chubby face that looked like it was made out of Play-Doh) but I'm not looking for a handsome guy, I'm looking for a smart one." Finally, he agreed, and in 1991 he became moderator of the show.

...The show made him rich and famous. I don't know how rich, but a few years ago, when he signed a new, long-term contract with NBC, he called me up to tell me, and he remembered his reluctance about taking the job. He laughed, and he said: "I thank you. My wife thanks you. My son thanks you. And my unborn grandchildren, however many there will be, thank you." It must have been a good deal.

Around The Horn

2008-06-05T15:22:00.003-04:00

Sorry the blogging has been so light. It seems to be one of those seasons of life when blogging is difficult to get to. In the middle of an election season, no less! My daughter keeps reminding me that I need to get to the TV shows that I purposely left out of my top 10 sitcoms of all-time. In the meantime, until I can get to that, some links I've been enjoying today--with free annotation!:

Every preacher needs to read this excellent post at Pyromaniacs from Dan Phillips.

This was published months ago and I missed it, but the New York Times has a fascinating piece on the "conversion" of noted former atheist Antony Flew to theism (or really Deism, more accurately). If the story is to be believed, evangelicals might be taking advantage of a confused old man to bolster their case against atheism. (HT: Heidelblog)

Doug Wilson has been beautifully contesting N.T. Wright's notions of Christian solutions for Third World problems. Wright advocates the traditional liberal responses (e.g. aid, debt forgiveness, etc.), but as Wilson aptly points out, "just do something--anything" is not a wise or helpful course of action:
Turns out that food aid to Africa isn't doing what liberal guilt motives insist that it must be doing. Many of the things we do over there just make things worse. Let's go over that again, so that the point is not missed or lost in the confusion. Many of the things we do just make things worse.
Wilson goes on to cite this interesting article for details. (For other excellent entries in Wilson's series, see here, here, here, and here.)

Here's a good article about how Ted Kennedy is awfully fortunate that he's not limited to the European-style universal health care he's dead-set on sticking the rest of us with. For example:
Consider, too, the chemo drug Kennedy is receiving: Temodar, the first oral medicine for brain tumors in 25 years.

Temodar has been widely used in this country since the FDA approved it in 2000. But a British health-care rationing agency, the National Institute for Comparative Effectiveness, ruled that, while the drug helps people live longer, it wasn't worth the money - and denied coverage for it.
But, of course, as is often the case with liberals, Kennedy's "solutions" are for everybody else.

In an effort to figure out what all the hubbub is about and enter the 21st century, I'm now what feels like the oldest person on Facebook. Just being there makes me feel like some kind of creepy predator. But other than that, it's great. Stop by and say hi. Or however it works. I hope someday to conduct all of my human relationships exclusively via Facebook.

Continuing The Blatant Self-Promotion

2008-05-28T17:05:00.004-04:00

Okay, so the interview I did with Jerry Newcombe did air on C-SPAN 2 last night, and according to their Book TV schedule, it will air again:

Sunday, June 1, at 9:00 AM
Sunday, June 1, at 7:00 PM
Monday, June 2, at 4:00 AM
Saturday, June 7, at 8:30 PM

Just in case you missed it. The part with me starts about 35 minutes in (though of course it's all good). And if you're really dying for entertainment, you can watch it now on their website.

Okay, that's the last I'll have to say about C-SPAN. At least until the next time I make fun of it after watching a guy standing at a podium in a Border's store speaking to seven geeks in Braintree, MA, one of which geeks actually bumps the camera in the middle of the show. Then I'll talk about C-SPAN again. But in the meantime....

C-SPAN Update

2008-05-27T10:33:00.002-04:00

After about a million revisions (these people ain't kidding when they say "subject to change"), C-SPAN's website is now showing that the program I did with Jerry Newcombe about his book How Would Jesus Vote? will air TONIGHT at 8pm Eastern on C-SPAN 2's "Book TV."

Might the airdates for this coming weekend still be valid? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Nobody seems to know. One begins to think that C-SPAN has spent so much time covering Congress that they've become like Congress. But anyway, tonight it is, until the next revision which will probably come later this afternoon. Or perhaps midway through the program.

At this point, your guess is as good as mine.

C-Spanning The Globe

2008-05-23T14:47:00.006-04:00

If you're interested in this kind of thing, you can see yours truly on C-SPAN 2 next Sunday, June 1st at 7pm Eastern. (It will also air at 9am Eastern that morning, but I know you'll be in church then. Right?)

I'll be interviewing my good friend Jerry Newcombe about his new book (which he wrote with the late D. James Kennedy) called How Would Jesus Vote?

(Unfortunately, on short notice, they weren't able to come up with a controversial title for the book, so they went with this one instead.)

If you're not able to watch it, I'm sure there will probably be repeated re-airings for insomniacs at 3:12am every second Wednesday of the month for the forseeable future. I'm told that these times are "subject to change," which they already have at least once. I'll keep you posted.

Hey, c'mon. You knew you were going to be watching C-SPAN 2 anyway. Why miss it?

Back Home Again With Indiana

2008-05-22T11:32:00.003-04:00

I was a little concerned when I heard they were making a new Indiana Jones movie. After the way Sylvester Stallone has been destroying the memories of once great film franchises, the prospect of senior citizen Harrison Ford doing whip tricks at the nursing home was disturbing to say the least.

We went to the opening of the film last night, and as it turns out, I needn't have feared. Granted, I didn't come in with particularly high expectations, but I found the new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to be loads of fun and solid entertainment, which, while not matching the greatness of the first film (or even, perhaps, the third one) is a worthy entry in the Indy franchise. It's actually better than the second one. (Which brings up a movie-making corollary. Never, ever cast a family member in a film. See: Capshaw, Kate. Or Coppola, Sophia.)

The obvious issue to be dealt with is Indy's age, and it's handled winningly, which is why the film works. Indiana Jones movies have always been tongue-in-cheek, so they have a built in advantage in this department over, say, the dead-earnest "Rocky" films. It also doesn't hurt that Harrison Ford has kept himself in good shape and doesn't look like a 65 year old guy up there. It's great to see him and Karen Allen together again (and bless her for letting herself age gracefully like a normal person rather than the typical stretch-faced Hollywood star), and the kid what's-his-name adds some fun.

There is, of course, some weird, cultic spirituality on display, but that kind of thing has always been prominent in the archaeology-premised series anyway. More bothersome were a couple of gratuitous s-bombs from the kid. Still, if you're a fan of the Indiana Jones series, you'll find a lot to like in this one. And Spielberg is like a kid in a candy store, stuffing every theme and fantasy he's ever dealt with basically into one film (though now that I think of it, I didn't see a shark's fin). It's gonna make about $300 million bucks, I expect.

A Beautiful Mind

2008-05-19T16:32:00.003-04:00

If you've never seen this video before, I highly recommend that you take five minutes and have a look. It's an autistic guy who, after flying over a city he's never been to before for 45 minutes, can draw the entire thing in astounding detail days later. It's really quite incredible.