From Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope:

“It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.”

Now this is just historically wrong. The Founders did believe in absolute truth and further believed that having a free society required it. (See, for example, the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.) The notion that belief in absolute truth is the foundation instead of tyranny is wrong historically, philosophically, politically. It is, however, postmodernist cant. It is how postmodernist professors sell relativism to ignorant and want-to-please college Freshmen. But it is demonstrably wrong (though showing something is wrong is hard to do to someone who has swallowed the relativist bait).

Relativism comes from the anti-Enlightenment philosopher Hegel, whose dialectical materialism is the foundation of Communism! Relativism’s highest expression is surely to be found in Nietzsche, whose constructionism (there are no absolute truths or morality, so the superman can create his own truths and morals) is the foundation of Fascism! [As well as of postmodernism itself, as I show in my book Modern Fascism: The Threat to the Judeo-Christian Worldview (Concordia Scholarship Today)]

HT: Caleb Jones. Tomorrow I will post what he says about this point.

A British pundit, Melanie Phillips, says that her country needs a Sarah Palin. In doing so, she makes some intriguing points:

so-called ‘progressives’ on both sides of the Atlantic have gone into paroxysms of rage and panic over Sarah Palin.

For she has taken the supposed characteristics of the Left  -  youth, dynamism, change, excitement and social conscience  -  and presented them as conservative virtues.
Since the Left habitually shores up its own position by demonising conservatives as nasty, backward-looking, mean-spirited, lifedenying, prejudiced, stupid and boring, it recognises her as a mortal threat  -  not just to Obama but to its whole political platform. . . .

Like McCain and Obama, [Tory leader David] Cameron too has grasped the public’s anti-establishment mood.

But he made the error of assuming that the reactionary old order to be overturned was conservatism, while change, hope and progress resided on the Left.

But this is a caricature which, although an article of faith among the media, bears scant relation to reality.

It is the Left which upholds the miserable social and educational status quo which causes such misery and harm to so many at the bottom of the heap.

It is the Left which preaches despair by believing that nothing can be done to stop social ills such as crime, drug addiction or teenage pregnancy.

Instead, it sets up vast infrastructures at public expense to mitigate their worst effects  -  which has the effect of entrenching and deepening those very social ills.

By contrast, any hope of real change for the better lies in the restoration of this country’s tradition of morality rooted in Christian religious conscience, exemplified by the Tories’ Social Justice Commission.

Great quote from Todd Palin, the husband of the G.O.P. vice presidential candidate:

If I had a crystal ball a few years ago, I might have asked a few more questions when Sarah decided to join the PTA.

I was speaking at the Texas Confessional Lutheran conference over the weekend, so I missed the visit of Tropical Storm Hanna. I’m kind of sorry I wasn’t there, but my wife battened down the hatches for what amounted to just a really heavy rain. But at the conference, imagine my surprise when I met the parents of some of you readers! There was the mother of Lisa. And the parents of constant commenter tODD! I did not realize that tODD grew up in Faith Lutheran church in Plano, TX, a fine congregation that I’ve spoken at before. tODD is a good reminder to us all of the Two Kingdoms truth that one can be conservative theologically while being liberal politically.