Religion (Real)
Washington Post’s Krauthammer: McCain for President
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 24, 2008
Contrarian that I am, I’m voting for John McCain. I’m not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it’s over before it’s over. I’m talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they’re left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.
I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.
First, I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The “erratic” temperament issue, for example. As if McCain’s risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.
McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.
Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.
McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.
Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama’s most egregious association — with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the past year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?
There’s just no comparison. Obama’s own running mate warned this week that Obama’s youth and inexperience will invite a crisis — indeed a crisis “generated” precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?
And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he’s been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.
The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.
Today’s economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I’m for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Housewives Wake Up! Oprah’s Selling Nothing-ism
I just found this video on youtube. Wow. I had no idea Oprah is such a void floater. I can’t believe women watch this crap. Scary peer-pressure brainwashing.
How dense do you have to be to not understand the meaning behind simple Bible language? I guess you have to not really seek to understand. I won’t even honor that lack of understanding with an explanation of that passage (unless one of you asks for it, but I’m sure you all get it).
Like I’ve always thought, she just barely smart enough to dupe the American housewife (who I used to believe were more intelligent, but not now that I’ve seen this and watch Oprah’s popularity soar). She happened into the right place (self-loathing or self-congratulatory white women) at the right time (the height of political correctness before we realized it’s language/thought control from the left), for her to succeed like she has. And now she’s abusing her power over those easily misled American housewives.
“Just Bad Luck? All of Obama’s People Hate America…”
Glenn Beck’s got a hilarious piece on the bad luck Obama’s had in being surrounded by those who hate, or at the very least aren’t proud of America.
Then Barack is like, “Hey, I want to be a state senator. Where should I have it? I mean, I could launch it from a park, you know, I could go to like a cool podium some place, maybe I can go to Pizza Hut. Where could I possibly — and somebody says, hey, I know, you can go do it at my house. And he’s like, really? Now, you would think to yourself, well, that’s lucky. And I’m sure that’s what Barack Obama was thinking, “I don’t know if I have a place to do it, I don’t know if I can get a park and a podium, I don’t know if I can get into Pizza Hut and we’ll have room for all the cameras. And this guy seems to have a big house. I mean, I don’t know him, we live in the same neighborhood but we don’t really talk.” Okay, so he launches at his house, and it’s this beautiful house. Turns out — ready for this one? Turns out the guy is a home grown terrorist.
McCain Proves Superior At Saddleback
I hope everyone had a chance watch the forum with McCain and Barry Oblivious. If not, please do so below. While Obama was struggling to begin half of his responses with uhhh, ummm, I, I, I think…, McCain had clear ideas with conviction in them and his whole presence was much more impressive than I expected. It’s good to see the relatively unscripted side of these two (though of course they both have somewhat memorized positions on all of these issues).
Obama
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6
McCain
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5
Related articles…
Obama’s Religious Roots Raise Questions
Obama speaking of his mother’s beliefs in The Pompous Agent of Fiction, er, The Audacity of Hope…
“For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. “This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.
“In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.”
It was clearly a moral-relativist upbringing. A “working knowledge of the world’s great religions”? Not sure how religion could get a serious shake, or any sort of moral compass instilled, in a home of two atheist parents. Speaking for myself, had I grown up in such moral flexibility/ambiguity, and political confusion, would likely lead me to join a religion only for the society of it, or perhaps for the ability of that organization to get me where I want to go. That established, it’s not a stretch to believe that Obama chose Christianity with calculation because it might get him the farthest politically with, first, other black Christians in Chicago and then (should he dare to dream) rising to various levels of power within the most Christian country in the world.
Scary to think he might have planned this; that he might have methodically picked a religion like a country club to get gain in the world, but being a believer myself I will refrain from measuring another’s faith as much as possible. I just mention the circumstances as food for thought.
Another interesting quote…
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
There’s so much round talking on the Left that one can hardly question whether we’re playing children’s games with conversation. Broken down to the core message, without the spin and lack of resolution, Barack Oblivious is saying “you can’t just use the Bible justify being anti-abortion, you have to use a reason that everyone will agree with” (based on what set of morals he’s thinking I don’t know, but I’ll bite. How about using the secular B.S. he espouses not far before this passage (bold added)…
And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.
Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.
Wouldn’t his secular mother then have instilled in him the “reverence for life” that would conflict with the convenience of liberal abortion? He seems to have difficulty reaching obvious conclusions when they conflict with the liberal voting block.
He continues…
In a sense, my dilemma… mirrors the broader dilemma that liberalism has faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us to be tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs [does it?], so long as those beliefs don’t cause anyone harm [like a defenseless unborn baby?] or impinge on another’s right to believe differently. To the extent that religious communities are content to keep to themselves and faith is neatly confined as a matter of individual conscience, such tolerance is not tested.
But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very public affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize wherever they can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend their beliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.
And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve these aims, liberals get nervous.
I would be glad to keep specific religion out of the public square (mostly because I wouldn’t have the patience to listen to Mulsims and VooDoo practitioners trying to get equal time) but certainly in all cases my belief that a person who believes in any brand of monotheism is a good thing. Cards on the table, anyone who thinks we’re an accident, or that there is nothing/no one behind all of this, gets no respect from me (and frankly they should be granted a pair of spectacles and a quiet place to think until the obivous occurs to them).
So that said, I will clarify that I don’t want religion systematically installed in the public square for the above reasons, but conversely it should not be forcibly withheld from the public square either. The desires (not rights) of the godless (12% of the U.S. population) should certainly not have the power to silence and suppress the desires of the many (85% of the U.S. claims Christianity).
Evangelism is a good thing. If any of us has found an eternal truth, the greatest thing we can do is share it with our fellowmen. I have a very clear set of beliefs of which I’m certain and confident, yet I see the evangelical efforts of those with different beliefs as a positive thing. My thinking is that anything that causes a man to believe in God is a good thing. Even if the belief system doesn’t mesh with mine, at least that person is now thinking about spiritual things and the importance, purpose, and meaning of this life a little more. That kind of thinking leads to prayer. Prayer leads to more personal revelation about eternal truth and the cycle continues. It’s a beautiful thing.
So no, I think we should all preach to each other always, and not be offended at the differences but take those things that touch the heart and soul and add them to our beliefs. Having the faithless keep me from exercising mine in public is against everything this country should and did stand for. The atheist activists can go pound sand for all I care. The arrogance of believing everything’s an accident is where my Christian patience ends. But I love them anyway, as best I can, and hope for their comas to end. Perhaps we should shake them harder.