Entries Tagged 'Politics' ↓

William J. Bennett & Seth Leibsohn on Barack Obama on National Review Online:

Barack Obama is to the left of Hillary Clinton and NARAL on the issue of life. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, a law that would have protected babies if they survived an attempted abortion and were delivered alive. When a similar bill was proposed in the United States Senate, it passed unanimously and even the National Abortion Rights Action League issued a statement saying they did not oppose the law.

Look. I was intrigued by Obama in the early days of the campaign, as a survey of this blog will show. I would like someone who can unify the nation, heal the divide between right and left, etc., etc. But could some of you Obamacons show me ONE example of how he would do this, or even ONE example of how he deviates from the leftwing of the Democratic party.

It is said that a candidate’s views on abortion don’t matter all that much, since there is little that a president can do about it. That’s just not true. George Bush has done a great deal for the pro-life cause, ushering in the partial-birth abortion ban and successfully working to get it upheld by the Supreme Court and standing firm in limiting the cannibalization of unborn children for their stem cells. Not to mention appointing good Supreme Court and lower level judges.

What case can possibly be made for a pro-lifer to support Obama? I really want to know.

Some folks in India are presenting Barack Obama with an idol–notice how even believers in these gods call them that–of a deity that the presidential candidate apparently uses as a good luck charm. From Obama to get Hanuman idol-India-The Times of India:

With Democrat senator Barack Obama busy in the run-up to the US presidential polls, a group of well-wishers in the capital have decided to send him a symbol of his lucky charm, Lord Hanuman, to help him emerge victorious.

Obama’s representative Carolyn Sauvage-Mar on Tuesday received a gold-plated two-feet-high idol which she will pass it on to the Obama after it is sanctified.

The idol is being presented to Obama as he is reported to be a Lord Hanuman devotee and carries with him a locket of the monkey god along with other good luck charms.

An hour-long prayer meeting to sanctify the idol was earlier organised at Sankat Mochan Dham and by Congress leader Brijmohan Bhama, Balmiki Samaj and the temple’s priests.

“Obama has deep faith in Lord Hanuman and that is why we are presenting an idol of Hanuman to him,” said Bhama.

See also this. OK, he’s not a Muslim, so is he a Hindu? I suspect he is just one of those polytheists that make up the new American majority, as documented in the Pew Survey.

I do understand that Obama can’t be held responsible for what some fans of his in India ascribe to him, but surely, as the Christian he claims to be, he should draw the line at idolatry, shouldn’t he?

Why don’t politicians just not say anything about theology, rather than speechifying about it and getting it wrong? James Dobson of Focus on the Family is jumping on things Barack Obama said in an attempt to get Christians of all stripes to come around to his candidacy. Read Dobson accuses Obama of ‘distorting’ Bible. Excerpts:

“Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools?” Obama said. “Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?” referring to the civil rights leader.

Dobson took aim at examples Obama cited in asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application.”
“Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Obama said.

Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament. “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said. . . .

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people. . . .

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Surely Obama displayed a surprising Biblical illiteracy in his handling of Scripture. Didn’t Rev. Wright ever get around to explaining the difference between Old Testament laws and the Gospel of Christ? Or that the latter is not just a more radical law?

John McCain is old; Barack Obama is young. McCain looks back; Obama looks forward; McCain represents the past; Obama represents the new. See how Peggy Noonan frames the election in terms of two mindsets already at work in our culture: the Old America vs. the New America:

In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.

In the New America, love of country is a decision. It’s one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.

Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.

The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn’t decide, it decided. Now it’s all on you. Old America, when life didn’t work out: “Luck of the draw!” New America when life doesn’t work: “I made bad choices!” Old America: “I had faith, and trust.” New America: “You had limited autonomy!”

Old America: “We’ve been here three generations.” New America: “You’re still here?”

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.

The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The New: I’ll sue.

Mr. McCain is the old world of concepts like “personal honor,” of a manliness that was a style of being, of an attachment to the fact of higher principles.

Mr. Obama is the new world, which is marked in part by doubt as to the excellence of the old. It prizes ambivalence as proof of thoughtfulness, as evidence of a textured seriousness.

She goes on in this vein. . . .What do you think of her categories? Is the New America inevitable?

I can’t tell if this website is for Obama or against him. I suspect the latter. But it does chronicle all of the fascinating ways that Barack Obama is being thought of in religious terms, as, literally, a Messiah. Read, for an example of the apotheosis [use that word in conversation too!] of Obama, the piece in the California newspaper that presents him as one in a long series of “LightWorkers.”

Michael Gerson points out that John McCain’s nomination is also something of a miracle. The column, while interesting in itself, is notable in that it uses the word syzygy. That’s the first time I have ever come across that word apart from a game of Scrabble. Coming from the Greek word for “yoke,” it refers to three different planets lining up in a straight line. (Yes, I had to look it up.)

Your assignment for today, class, is to find a way to use that word in the course of your normal conversation.

Barack Obama now has enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination. I salute him for beating Hillary Clinton. I do predict Obama will choose her as his vice-presidential running-mate. She has said that she’s interested in the post, which surprised me, and now that she has gone public with her willingness it would be a slap in the face not to offer it to her. Despite the hostilities of the primary season, the Democrats will now unify.

I’m not sure if Obama is going to be easy for John McCain to beat, or impossible for him to beat. My thoughts go back and forth on this.

Whatever happens, we will have either a centrist president or a liberal president. The era of conservative domination appears to be over, at least for now. We will have change, for better or for worse (or for both).

What do you think the future holds for America with either of these two as president?

Douglas Kmiec is a pro-life conservative Republican, but he is supporting Barack Obama for president. For this, a Catholic priest has denied him communion.

The California law professor is a leading “Obamacon,” the new term for a conservative who is in favor of Obama. Kmiec says he is voting for him in spite of the candidate’s pro-abortion views, thinking that his call for sexual responsibility will reduce the number of abortions while still keeping them legal. See E. J. Dionne Jr. - For an ‘Obamacon,’ Communion Denied.

Do you think this priest went a little too far? Denying communion to a lawmaker whose actions to legalize abortion contribute to the evil is one thing, but should this extend to someone who votes for that candidate?

According to the official policy of the Catholic bishops, it can be permissible to vote for a pro-choice candidate as long as your “intention” is not to promote abortion. That would seem to rule this priest’s action as being out of line, but is this distinction just an example of Catholic casuistry? On the other hand, would excommunicating voters constitute an impermissible interference of church with state?

Here is an interesting historic account, occasioned by the current conflict in the Democratic party between advocates of the first black president vs. advocates of the first woman president: When Disadvantages Collide. It seems that the early suffragettes opposed giving black men the right to vote before white women had that right. I won’t even repeat what feminist icon Elizabeth Cady Stanton said on the subject.

Some of you have chastised me for not taking global warming seriously enough–to the point of making a joke about it. Some of you have taken issue with some of my quite environmentalist ideas about wanting to protect species (on the grounds that God made them and so He must want them around) and decrying genetic engineering (on the grounds that it is “unnatural”). But looming behind scientific disagreements and tactical disputes is an ideology that, according to Charles Krauthammer, is the left’s new pretext for imposing statist power:

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation. “The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.” . . .

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia’s priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment — carbon chastity — they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

Krauthammer goes on to recommend tangible measures to help the environment, while avoiding this ideology. One of them is to promote the cleanest large-scale energy source of them all right now, namely, nuclear energy, something opposed by much of the environmentalist left.

I’m telling you, it’s all in Milton. (Actually, it’s all in the Bible, but I’m referring to Milton’s having a language for it.) Here is another Milton application from Robert D. Novak, discussing Hillary Clinton’s assassination reference and her other ways:

This recalls Milton’s 17th-century tragic poem “Samson Agonistes” — portraying Samson as a battler. “Eyeless in Gaza” was the poet’s reference not only to physical blindness but also to failure to comprehend reality. As “Hillary Agonistes,” she threatens to bring down the temple of the country’s oldest political party.

Terry Mattingly has some fascinating analysis of why many liberal, secular Jews have a problem with Barack Obama. See Obama and the Jewish votes » GetReligion, which analyzes this quotation from a news article about Florida Jews:”Many here suspect Mr. Obama of being too cozy with Palestinians, while others accuse him of having Muslim ties, even though they know that his father was born Muslim and became an atheist, and that Mr. Obama embraced Christianity as a young man. In Judaism, religion is a fixed identity across generations.”

In other words, if religious identity is primarily a matter of ethnicity and culture and one cannot change that through, well, mere religious conversion, then that means that Obama is still in some way — Muslim. So the purely cultural approach to Judaism, which is normally identified with secular Judaism and more liberal cultural views that are far, far from doctrinal, Orthodox Judaism, may not be something that helps Obama in some settings, especially among the elderly.

And the Orthodox? They are not going to be happy at all with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., no matter what happens. They are also not going to be happy with Obama’s very liberal stands on crucial moral and cultural issues. And then there is the issue — Wright or wrong — about Obama’s enthusiastic support for his mainline Protestant denomination, the United Church of Christ. There is a history there, as in many mainline flocks, of fierce debate about the status of Israel.

The UCC, like some other mainline liberal denominations, has been pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel for years. Notice, though, how a good many, if not most, world religions are primarily about cultural identity. Christianity is about BELIEF. That distinction is not always recognized, so that many people see Christianity as a cultural religion also. Obama is not a Muslim, but many people in the world are going to treat him as one.