Entries Tagged 'Politics' ↓

Jerry Falwell has passed away. Now Rick Warren, megachurch pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” has taken his place.

In an extraordinary feat, he got both presidential candidates to come to his Saddleback church and submit to his questioning. It would have been unthinkable for Rev. Falwell to invite a Democrat and even more unthinkable for a Democrat to show up. I am impressed that Rev. Warren donned a sports coat for the occasion, since he usually preaches in an Aloha shirt. (I wonder why he did that. Did he sense that sometimes a certain level of formality is appropriate? Why have such decorum with politicians but not for church?)

So what is this significance of this shift in leadership and in clout?

Rick Warren’s inquisition of the candidates elicited some interesting answers.

In his answers, Obama described many of his positions, even on taxes and energy, in the language of a devout Christian. When asked about his “greatest moral failing,” he discussed his teenage drug and alcohol use, attributing it to “a certain selfishness on my part. I was so obsessed with me, and the reasons why I might be dissatisfied, that I couldn’t focus on other people.”

Confronted with the same question later, McCain cited the failure of his first marriage. . . .

“I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him,” Obama told Warren. “That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” McCain said he had been “saved and forgiven” through his belief in Christ.

Each also said he defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, but Obama added that he supports civil unions for same-sex couples. . . .

At Saddleback, Obama did not respond directly when Warren asked him at what point “a baby gets human rights.” He said the issue is “above my pay grade,” and pivoted quickly to his quest to find common ground. He noted that he had inserted pregnancy-prevention language in the 2008 Democratic platform, which he cast as a major turn in party policy.

In his interview with Warren, McCain received loud applause from the crowd of more than 2,000 when he declared his view that unborn children deserve rights “at the moment of conception,” and offered one of the most emphatic declarations of his opposition to abortion in his presidential campaign.

“I have a 25-year pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate,” McCain said. “This presidency will have pro-life policies.”

Did anyone hear what the two said about another topic raised by Rev. Warren, the existence of evil? Such actual theology was not reported in the “Washington Post.”

In an interview with the Weekly Standard, McCain Won’t Rule Out Pro-choice Running Mate:

IN A WIDE-RANGING INTERVIEW aboard his campaign plane this morning, John McCain said that he is open to choosing a pro-choice running mate and named former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as someone who merits serious consideration despite his support for abortion rights. . . .

“I think that the pro-life position is one of the important aspects or fundamentals of the Republican Party,” McCain said. “And I also feel that–and I’m not trying to equivocate here–that Americans want us to work together. You know, Tom Ridge is one of the great leaders and he happens to be pro-choice. And I don’t think that that would necessarily rule Tom Ridge out.” . . .

“I think it’s a fundamental tenet of our party to be pro-life but that does not mean we exclude people from our party that are pro-choice. We just have a–albeit strong–but just it’s a disagreement. And I think Ridge is a great example of that. Far moreso than Bloomberg, because Bloomberg is pro-gay rights, pro, you know, a number of other issues.”

Of the four individuals most frequently mentioned as potential McCain runningmates–Joe Lieberman, Tom Ridge, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty–Lieberman and Ridge are pro-choice and Romney, by his own account, was pro-choice until at least November 2004.

So if McCain also just wants pro-lifers and pro-deathers to “work together,” how is this different from what Barack Obama is saying? If he actually DOES pick a pro-death running mate, that strongly suggests the issue is not important to him and he’ll lose the vote of lots of cultural conservatives.

Terry Mattingly at Get Religion discusses Democratic efforts to woo Catholics and Evangelicals by making some seemingly pro-life gestures in the new party platform. From Wooing the liberal pro-life vote, again:

The 2004 platform stated:

Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman’s right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

As Democrats For Life leaders have noted, this language says that to be pro-life is to back a Republican policy stance — period. There is no room for conscience on this issue among Democrats.

Now, the proposed 2008 platform language states:

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to affordable family planning services and comprehensive age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre and post natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

Even this small of a concession has enraged feminists and other pro-deathers. But does this new platform language make you feel better about the Democrats? Is this enough to make you pro-life Obama supporters feel less conflicted?

George Will, in an insightful column on Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Russia’s Power Play, makes the best comment I have seen on the opening ceremonies of the Olympics:

For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquely frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film “Triumph of the Will,” has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

Harold Meyerson offers a reading of the event, which he thinks will be turning point, with the world turning away from American-style democracy in favor of Chinese-style omnipotent and benevolent authoritarianism:

If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. (Much of Berlin’s 1936 Olympics, we should recall, was choreographed by Riefenstahl to fit the fascist aesthetics of her film “Olympiad.”) The subject of Zhang’s ceremonies was a celebration of Chinese achievement and power, at all times stressing China’s harmonious relations with the rest of the world. Its masterstroke, however, wasn’t its brilliant design but the decision, during the parade of the athletes, to have Chinese flag-bearer Yao Ming accompanied by an adorable 9-year-old boy who survived the recent catastrophic earthquake that killed many of his classmates, and who returned, after he had extricated himself from the rubble, to save two of his classmates. When asked why he went back, the NBC broadcaster told us, the boy said that he was a hall monitor and that it was his job to take care of his schoolmates.

That answer may tell us more than we want to know. He could have gone back because his friends were still inside. Instead, he went back because he was a responsible little part of a well-ordered hierarchy. For all we know, he might well have gone back even if he weren’t a hall monitor, but his answer — whether spontaneously his own or one that some responsible grown-up concocted for him — works brilliantly as an advertisement for an authoritarian power bent on convincing the world that its social and political model is as benign as any democracy’s.

What Russia did last Friday was appalling, but it ultimately poses no systematic challenge to the world’s democracies. What China did last Friday was entrancing, but its cuddly capitalist-Leninism, already much beloved by our major banks and corporations for its low-wage efficiency, poses a genuine economic challenge to the messier, unsynchronized workings of democracies. A nation that can assemble 2,000 perfectly synchronized drummers has clearly staked its claim as the world’s assembly line.

China has found how tyranny and economic prosperity can go together. If China really is the nation of the 21st century, what the USA was in the 20th, that kind of authoritarianism really may be the wave of the near future. Dictatorships really can be more efficient than Democracies in “getting things done,” which is what even Americans now want from their government. We are not sure what we want done and we citizens do not want to be bothered with figuring it out, preferring to leave that to the experts and to state power. Greek democracy was abandoned; the Roman republic gave way to Emperor. Couldn’t that happen with us too?

What really galled me about John Edwards acknowledging that his affair with a woman while his wife was struggling with cancer was his protestation that he didn’t love his mistress, as if that someone made it better. I was glad to find Richard Miniter explaining why saying such a thing is so contemptible. I mean, I would also find it despicable if he said he DID love her and used that as an excuse. But still.

(Now it appears that, contrary to what Edwards says, he may have begun the affair BEFORE paying the woman $114,000 of campaign money to be his photographer.)

The help we give to the Republicans we will also offer to the Democrats. Who should Barack Obama choose for his running mate?

Is there a Vice-Presidential choice that would make you MORE open to Obama? (Michael Gerson makes the case for the ex-missionary pro-life governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter.) If you are leaning in Obama’s direction, is there a pick that would make you LESS likely to support him?

Whoever mentions the name of the person whom Obama ACTUALLY chooses will win an imaginary crown of victory.

Carl Vehse proposes that we talk about who John McCain should select for Vice President, going so far as to promote a candidate:

Let’s talk about McCain and who he might chose for his VP. The Daily Time Herald in Carroll, IA, has one suggestion - Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Check out her credentials: Pro-life, NRA member, point guard of the 1982 State Champion Wasilla Warriors, Miss Wasilla of 1984, animal fur wearing, moose-burger-eating, snowmobile rider, obligatory Mid-East tourist, new mom, and has a possible campaign staff.

Moose-burger-eating! She sounds good to me. Do we have any other nominations from the floor?

Is there a Vice-Presidential choice that would make you either MORE likely to support McCain or LESS likely to support him?

Whoever mentions the name of the person whom McCain ACTUALLY chooses will win an imaginary crown of victory.

Victor Davis Hanson dissects Barack Obama’s speech in Germany. Hanson’s point is that the “world” doesn’t take actions; nations do. And that nations are not morally equivalent. Excerpts:

With all due respect, I also don’t believe the world did anything to save Berlin, just as it did nothing to save the Rwandans or the Iraqis under Saddam — or will do anything for those of Darfur; it was only the U.S. Air Force that risked war to feed the helpless of Berlin as it saved the Muslims of the Balkans. And I don’t think we have much to do in America with creating a world in which “famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” Bad, often evil, autocratic governments abroad cause hunger, often despite rich natural landscapes; and nature, in tragic fashion, not “the carbon we send into atmosphere,” causes “terrible storms,” just as it has and will for millennia.

Perhaps conflict-resolution theory posits there are no villains, only misunderstandings; but I think military history suggests that culpability exists — and is not merely hopelessly relative or just in the eye of the beholder. So despite Obama’s soaring moral rhetoric, I am troubled by his historical revisionism that, “The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love.”

I would beg to differ again, and suggest instead that a mass-murdering Soviet tyranny came close to destroying the European continent (as it had, in fact, wiped out millions of its own people) and much beyond as well — and was checked only by an often lone and caricatured U.S. superpower and its nuclear deterrence. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was no danger to the world from American nuclear weapons “destroying all we have built” — while the inverse would not have been true, had nuclear and totalitarian communism prevailed. We sleep too lightly tonight not because democratic Israel has obtained nuclear weapons, but because a frightening Iran just might.

HT: CRB

Some 200,000 Germans came out to hailBarack Obama . Does that make you like him more–after all, he would surely make America more popular around the world–or does it make you like him less, with global politicking and his talk of “global citizenship” giving you the creeps?

See Presumed Presidential Nominees McCain and Obama to Make First Joint Campaign Appearance on August 16 at Saddleback Church. Note too about the “interfaith” gathering. What do you think the megachurch version of Christian political activism will be?

Charles Krauthammer has written a devastating column about Brack Obama’s pretensions. An excerpt:

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history — “generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment” — when, among other wonders, “the rise of the oceans began to slow.” As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, “Moses made the waters recede, but he had help.” Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he’s King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” which, translating the royal “we,” means: “I am the one we’ve been waiting for.” Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule — it was pointed out that he was not yet president — induced him to take it down. . . .

His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism … that you come out of your isolation. … Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?