(Worst) Father of the Year Award

August 29, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Sloan Briles is a real winner:

A California man was arrested for investigation of throwing his crying 7-year-old son into the water from a sightseeing cruise boat during an argument that shocked other passengers, authorities said Monday.

…”The father hit him several times and then threatened to throw him overboard if he didn’t stop crying,” Amormino said. “The crowd on the boat became very angry at the father for hitting the kid and extremely angry when he threw him overboard.”

The child was rescued from the water and given back to his mother.  In other parenting news:

1.  Treating one child as a favorite, according to a new study, leads to higher rates of depression both for the less-favored children and for the favored child.

2.  Children, with the help of their father, sue their mother for bad parenting — and lose.  Read all about it.

Filed Under: Parenting

What's So Scary About Rick Perry?

August 26, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Douglas MacKinnon writes at Investor’s Business Daily:

Beyond the usual suspects in the far-left media, many in the GOP establishment such as Karl Rove, are doing all they can to derail the Perry campaign. Again, why?

Erick Erickson, in an excellent horse race summation in Red State, nails the answer:

“So you have these guys … trying to settle every score they can with Perry and his consultant, Dave Carney. … Because so much of the consultant class will be shut out of the White House should Rick Perry win, their livelihoods depend on Rick Perry losing either now or in November.

And frankly, for a few in the GOP consultant class, they’ll gladly see Perry lose in November just to ensure they are not shut out of a Republican White House. For all the talk of Perry being an establishment guy, the establishment hates his guts as much as the left does . . .”

No, no, no.  This is not the right way to go.  When conservative writers adopt a populist stance and inveigh against the “GOP establishment,” this reeks of a kind of class warfare that should have no place here.  Conservatives should not demonize those who have been successful and gained influence and experience.  Casting doubt on the motives of anyone who opposes Perry, suggesting that they oppose him only because of their professional aspirations, is also cheap rhetoric.  Is that also why Perry supporters support him, because they want a job?  Speculating on motives gets us nowhere.  The truth is, our motives are often mixed.  Many fiscal conservatives have misgivings regarding Perry not because they want jobs in a Romney administration, or not only for that reason, but because they (also?) believe Romney is far better equipped to manage the current financial crisis and guide the country back toward economic health.

Let’s see if we can get to the heart of the matter.  I realize this is going to upset some of my fellow conservatives who read this blog.  But my job here is to speak honestly.  So I’ll be honest with you.  Perry scares me.  He embarrasses me.  He makes me uneasy.

If there’s one thing I have done frequently in my writings on political matters, it’s defending against caricatures.  I’ve rejected the caricature of the Tea Party, rejected the caricature of Sarah Palin, and rejected the caricature of conservative Christians from Christine O’Donnell to Michele Bachmann.  I’m not about to caricature Rick Perry.  He’s no “dominionist,” i.e., someone who believes that Christians should rule (and take by violence, if necessary) all the power centers of society and impose an Old Testament or theocratic law.  That’s rubbish.  And yes, he considers climate change and evolution overhyped and oversold — but so do most Americans.  Those beliefs are not unreasonable in themselves; what matters is the way in which you came to them.

So what concerns me so much about Rick Perry?  He’s a strong proponent of limited government — which I favor.  He’s strongly opposed to abortion — and I am too.  So what’s the problem?  The truth is, I have a hard time defining what I find so unsettling about him.  I’ll try to flesh it out in a series of posts on this blog in the weeks and months to come.  But here are a couple quick thoughts:

1.  Even for a Christian and a conservative like myself, Rick Perry’s brand of god-and-country politics goes too far.  To be sure, he’s no theocrat.  But there is a subtle blurring of the lines between the church and the state amongst Perry and his devotees that could end up greatly damaging the church.  Political leaders cannot be religious leaders.  I do not mean that he cannot pray in public; but Perry managed to position himself as a kind of political, cultural and pseudo-religious savior all at once, someone who would restore small government, a respect for law and life, and a commitment to fundamental Judeo-Christian values and truths.

When church and state grow intertwined, the state always wins, and the church is distorted.  This is because the state appeals to the flesh, appeals to our natural inclinations toward power, fortune and fame.  The church asks you to put these inclinations aside.  When the two enmesh, and the state becomes the means for the church’s ends, then eventually you find religious leaders so thoroughly imbricated in the pursuit of power, fortune and fame that they cannot find their way out.  Another way of putting this is: When the church and state are enmeshed, the church cannot gain the distance it needs to speak prophetically over against the state and the culture it sanctions.  Thus the earlier generation of the Religious Right, when it lost its way, essentially became incapable of criticizing the GOP.  This is not healthy for the church, and it’s not healthy for the state, which always needs a prophetic critique.

I hope my fellow Christians will think long and hard on these things before they support Rick Perry.  There’s a sense of mounting pseudo-messianic expectation around Perry.  He’s happy to accept the religious adulation of conservative Christians, for political purposes.  It’s worrisome.

2.  The world is a complicated place, and Perry sees things too much in black and white.  To be sure, I believe in truth and falsehood, right and wrong.  I never felt that Bush was in the wrong when he called some things good and some things evil.  But how those truths are understood and how those goods are enacted are very complex things.  I’ve seen no evidence so far that Perry understands the world in all its numerous layers of complexity.

This is not to say that he’s unintelligent or foolish.  He is a very accomplished governor.  Fools don’t get that far.  It’s more of a mindset.  Voting for Rick Perry feels like a vote for battling the opposition; it’s putting a bruiser in the ring, someone who will take the fight to the Democrats and then cut loose like a bull in the beltway China shop, breaking up the old Washington order.  And I too feel like we need dramatic change.  But we need exactly the right kinds of changes, in exactly the right order and the right timing and the right modulation.  We are at a delicate moment in our history.  If we mismanage the transformations that we so desperately need right now, we are going to suffer for years, even decades.  I’m not sure that Rick Perry is the right person to manage this tremendously precarious moment in our national history.

A vote for Perry feels destructive — in the best sense, destructive of those things that seem to conservatives like they are the enemies of the state.  A vote for Romney, to me, feels constructive.  I’m open to having my mind changed on this, but Romney communicates the optimism and hope of Reagan, whereas Perry feels like a battleship in the culture war.

I also don’t think that Perry could win.  This is not going to be a cakewalk.  Electability is important.  As the public gets to know Perry better, I firmly believe they’re going to like him less.  And if he did win, would we spend 4-8 years making apologies and explanations for a President who says the Fed chairman is guilty of “treason”?  A guy whose swagger turns off half the country, and half the world?

3.  Finally, this is just an impression, a personal sense, but I feel a kind of falseness to Rick Perry.  There is a kind of performance he presents in order to win the support of the religious right.  And another performance to win the backing of the Tea Party.  This doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe the things he says he believes.  He almost surely does.  But I think Rick Perry believes, first and foremost, in Rick Perry.  I hate to say this, but in many ways he feels like the mirror image of Barack Obama — a conservative, Texas farmer version of Obama, as far to the Right as Obama is to the Left, as anti-intellectual as Obama is fawningly pro-intellectual, but ultimately shifting and performing in order to advance himself.  There is a kind of arrogance and self-interest in Rick Perry that I think people on both sides of the aisle should be able to recognize.

I realize many people say the same thing about Romney.  But I haven’t seen Romney perform his religious beliefs in the way Perry has performed his.  Maybe Romney has changed his views on a point or two, in part because of political expedience.  But the whole of Perry feels rather like an act.  Friends who know Romney (and know him well) say that he is, through and through, a man of great integrity.  Friends who know Perry (and know him well) say that he is not.  The word “slimy” comes up repeatedly.

Again, I’m just beginning to observe Rick Perry.  As a matter of intellectual integrity, I should keep an open mind.  And I will.  And I’ll write about this more as I sort through my feelings.  But right now I’m not liking what I’m seeing.  Sorry.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Morning Report: Environmental Insanity, More Cowbell!, Cornel West, the Failing Church, and Ralph Reed

August 26, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

In the News

1.  Walter Russell Mead, ever since he left the Henry Kissinger Chair on the Council of Foreign Relations, has been one of the best columnists and commentators in the country.  If you’re not reading him regularly, you should.  In his latest piece, he speaks of a bit of environmentalist madness that is preventing the United States from getting oil and jobs:

Here’s what the greens ignore: the oil is coming out of the ground whether or not the US allows a pipeline to be built.  The Canadians want to produce it, and if we don’t buy it, the Chinese will.  The pipeline that would take the dirty tar sands oil from Alberta to Canada’s Pacific coast would pass through pristine Rocky Mountain wilderness, across land belonging to some of Canada’s last native tribes, to the beautiful British Columbian coast, home of the amazingly rare “Spirit Bear” and one of the world’s few temperate rain forests, loaded on supertankers and shipped through treacherous coastal waters, very near where the Queen of the North lies on the ocean floor, rusting and leaking diesel fuel, a testament to the perils of sea navigation in these waters. But don’t take my word for it: read it in National Geographic.

The greens lobbying President Obama to block the pipeline are asking him to forgo thousands of jobs (in an election year in which jobs will could well be the major issue!) and billions of dollars in economic advantages — not to save the planet or reduce the carbon in the atmosphere, but to confer an economic and political advantage on China.  If President Obama takes the green advice, the US will get almost all of the disadvantages that come from using the oil ourselves, and lose out many of the benefits.

There’s another factor that has to be weighed.  Getting secure oil sources for the United States isn’t just a matter of convenience; reducing US exposure to foreign blackmail, and reducing our need to consider military interventions and other actions to protect our energy supply helps make war less likely — and allows us, all things being equal, to get along with somewhat smaller armed forces than would otherwise be required.

2. Victor Davis Hanson takes on the notion that we just haven’t spent enough in stimulus.  More cowbell!

3.  Cornel West explains why Martin Luther King Jr. is weeping from the grave:

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

If, on the other hand, you’d like a more mature (in every sense) take on what the Obama administration should be doing to guide the west back to economic health, see this piece from The New Republic by Robert Shapiro.

In the Pews

1.  Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson, two eminent scholars of religion, poke holes in all the sky-is-falling statistics about young people, and now women, leaving the church.  It’s worth a lengthy quotation:

The national news media yawned over the Baylor Survey’s findings that the number of American atheists has remained steady at 4% since 1944, and that church membership has reached an all-time high. But when a study by the Barna Research Group claimed that young people under 30 are deserting the church in droves, it made headlines and newscasts across the nation—even though it was a false alarm.

Surveys always find that younger people are less likely to attend church, yet this has never resulted in the decline of the churches. It merely reflects the fact that, having left home, many single young adults choose to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

Once they marry, though, and especially once they have children, their attendance rates recover. Unfortunately, because the press tends not to publicize this correction, many church leaders continue unnecessarily fretting about regaining the lost young people.

In similar fashion, major media hailed another Barna report that young evangelicals are increasingly embracing liberal politics. But only religious periodicals carried the news that national surveys offer no support for this claim, and that younger evangelicals actually remain as conservative as their parents.

Given this track record, it was no surprise this month to see the prominent headlines announcing another finding from Barna that American women are rapidly falling away from religion. The basis for this was a comparison between a poll they conducted in 1991 and one they conducted in January of this year.

Please read the whole thing.  At some point George Barna needs to be called out for sloppy workmanship and sensationalizing anything that comports with his church-is-falling-apart views.  Either that, or the mainstream media needs to get a little more savvy and not run with anything that sounds like bad news for the church.

2.  I’m very grateful to Ralph Reed for writing “The Inconvenient Truth of the Evangelical Vote“:

A funny thing happened on the way to the 2012 presidential contest. The conventional wisdom that social issues would not matter, and that the evangelical constituency is a relic of a bygone era, has been turned on its head. The beltway set is relearning one of the most inconvenient and persistent truths of American politics: the enduring strength of the evangelical vote.

This outcome was not necessarily prefigured by events. Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of religious voting patterns by appealing to evangelical voters on poverty, health care and climate change (excuse me, “creation care”). In May of 2008, the founder of Beliefnet predicted that Obama “has a real chance to win substantial evangelical support,” since “evangelicals are in a period of de-alignment from the Republican Party.”

That prediction didn’t fare so well…

3.  Bill Keller, editorial chieftain of the New York Times, must have thought this piece on asking candidates tougher faith-related questions was sophisticated.  It actually just illustrates how completely secular liberal media fails to understand evangelicals and conservative Christians in general.  The fact that he took Ryan Lizza’s profile of Michele Bachmann in The New Yorker — Lizza’s piece was a tattered fabrication of paranoia, guilt-by-association and unfounded insinuations — as “enlightening” and apparently respectable…well, it just boggles the mind.  Shouldn’t the executive editor of the New York Times know what good journalist looks like?

The always-fantastic Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion takes Keller to task.

Filed Under: Morning Report

Obama's Debt

August 24, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

According to numbers published yesterday, the federal debt has increased by over $4.2 billion for every single day that Barack Obama has been in office, or $3 million per minute.  In Obama’s 945 days in office, the federal debt has grown over $4 trillion.  As a criticism of President Obama, it’s a bit of a statistical cheap shot.  When he came into power, a substantial deficit was budgeted for his first year in office, and a majority of the American people (rightly or wrongly) were prepared to accept a substantial stimulus measure in the first months of his administration.  What are more disturbing are (1) the continued extraordinary level of deficit spending, (2) the projections in President Obama’s budgets for trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye could see, and (3) the paltry results of our federal spending binge.  When you see a budget that never balances, and indeed never comes close to balancing, it’s reasonable to assume that the strategy is to keep spending levels high in order to force an increase in revenue, an increase that would make the United States more nearly resemble the welfare states of Europe.

Obama’s defenders say that the Great Recession would have been even deeper if it were not for the stimulus spending.  In a superficial sense, that’s correct.  All that money had to go somewhere, and it did not all go overseas.  Some went into jobs and (too little) into infrastructure projects, some to prevent layoffs of federal and state employees, some to extend unemployment benefits, and those salaries and benefits were then spent by consumers.  You cannot spend a trillion dollars without creating some employment and consumption.  The questions, rather, are (1) Was the benefit greater than the cost?, and (2) Would another approach have been more effective or more efficient in achieving our goals?

To elaborate on (1), we could ask whether financing (say) a trillion dollars in spending through debt and money-printing have done more to harm the long-term prospects of the nation than the short-term benefit we gained from the stimulus measures.  How did the actions of the public sector affect the health of the private sector?  Did federal spending crowd out private sector spending?  Did it effectively undercut the private sector by weakening the dollar?  And if the deficit spending ultimately necessitates increased taxation, or leads to inflation, or leads to a more negative assessment of the American economy and stock market, or results in a permanently enlarged federal bureaucracy, then all of those things need to be figured into the “cost” in any cost/benefit analysis.

To elaborate on (2), we could certainly ask whether a trillion dollars could have been better spent in other ways (with more devoted to infrastructure, more to developing our non-renewable energy resources, more to research and employment training, etc.), or whether a better approach would have been to restrain federal spending, return to sound economic fundamentals and wait it out until the American consumer and the federal budget have regained their balance?  When $500,000 grants lead to the equivalent of 1.72 jobs, for instance, we can ask whether there were approaches that would have produced more jobs for the same (or a lesser) amount of money.

Then, of course, the even more important question is (3) Where do we go from here?  The leaders of both parties have created this problem.  The size of government and its debt expanded very rapidly under Bush, and has expanded twice as rapidly under Obama.  And whereas Bush was bringing the deficit down, and projected its elimination entirely, the Obama budgets have allowed astronomical deficit spending indefinitely.  I agree, apparently, with the majority of American economists, that cutting federal spending, even if it worsens the pain in the short term, is more in the long term interest of the United States.  56% of economists surveyed said the deficit should be closed “only or primarily” through spending cuts, compared to only 7% who thought it should be closed “only or primarily” through tax increases.  More on this soon.

It’s important to remember why this matters.  I’m not an economist, but I’m having to do an enormous amount of reading in the subject because budgets are indeed moral documents (insofar as they represent decisions for which we are morally accountable) and I believe it’s immoral to pass along a mountain of debt to our children and grandchildren.  I also believe it’s immoral to weigh down, more and more, the energy and creativity of the free market, where the poor as well as everyone else can find meaningful work and vocation.

Filed Under: economy, Election 2012, The Obama Presidency Tagged With: , , , , ,

Morning Report, August 24: Maybe Bush Wasn't the Problem, the Dangers of Public Employee Unions, Super-Rubio, Complementarianism, Evolution and Mahaney

August 24, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

In the News

1.  OBAMA: THE MAN WITH THE PLAN?  Although it contains a generous helping of the usual Obama-adoration (“He’s Tiger Woods — a natural who’s lost his swing”) from someone whose own sensibilities align with the President’s in almost every particular, Thomas Friedman’s column today is worth reading if only for this point: “People don’t want to cheer just the man anymore. They want to cheer the man and his plan — a real plan, not just generalities and tactics to get him re-elected with 50.0001 percent and no real mandate to do what’s needed to fix the country now.”

It might be better to say that in 2008, the man was the plan.  Those on the Left, and not a few from the Center, had spent so long blaming Bush for everything that it seemed apparent that replacing Bush with someone smarter, more modern, more global and cosmopolitan, would cause our problems to go away.  Since the problem was a man (Bush), the solution was a man (Obama) who seemed the opposite.  There was no need for specifics, since Obama was a person of supernatural intelligence, charm and skill, and surely he could solve our economic and foreign affairs challenges.

In other words, the plan was: put the right man in place, and let him come up with a plan.  This failed, in part because the man (I believe) is less than many thought he was, because the plans he’s developed and implemented have been less successful than we all would have hoped, and — in all probability — because the problem was not Bush in the first place.  Just as ‘the man’ in this case is not the solution, the man in that case was not the problem.

What astounds me is that Obama’s struggles against the same forces that beset Bush, and his continuation (and in some cases doubling-down) of countless Bush administration policies, has not led more Obama supporters to reassess their full-throated condemnations of Bush.  If Obama had reversed course, then one might plausibly make the case that he’s still fighting against the Bush legacy, struggling to overcome the problems that Bush left him.  His policies suggest, however, that Obama would not have done much different from Bush, with the possible exception of “tax cuts for the rich” and the war in Iraq.  Neither of these, however, is a major contributor to our current woes.

2.  UNIONS AND POLITICIANS.  Although this is not the way in which his article is framed, Steven Malanaga illustrates the dangers of public employee unions and the incestuous relationships that often form between them and politicians in the states they dominate.  When there is a large public union contingent, then politicians can effectively purchase votes by promising more and more for the unions in compensation and pensions, regardless of whether they are actually able (at present levels of revenue) to meet those obligations.  Then, when the state employee pension systems begin to bleed red ink, the state politicos have to scramble for more and more revenue, which makes the state increasingly hostile to business growth.  This only drives more employees into the hands of the state, and the cycle continues, with ever higher pension obligations and ever lower amounts of revenue.  The politicians become more beholden to the state employee unions, and the corruption grows deeper as the game of favoritism and kickbacks grows more intense, and private employers are driven from the field:

In New Jersey’s case, politicians made promises they couldn’t afford to keep in the form of enhanced pension benefits during a statewide election year in 2001, and then they went a decade contributing virtually nothing to the pension system. The state’s annual pension bill should be about $3 billion, but money has been flying out of the New Jersey pension funds in the form of retiree payments for years, with little coming in.

The math is ugly: last year, a study by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center estimated the funds were paying out nearly $6 billion a year in benefits, but they’ve been taking in only about $1.5 billion in employee contributions. With a stock market that’s gone nowhere in a decade, New Jersey’s own actuaries have estimated that without reform the funds could start running out of money as early as 2014, while Northwestern University finance professor Joshua Rauh pegged 2019 as the date the funds could go bust.

The results: a state once flush with jobs spilling out from New York City and Philadelphia is now ranked 44th in the country in job creation numbers.

There’s no mystery behind these numbers. Just ask business executives what they think about the state. In a recent survey by CEO Magazine, executives ranked New Jersey one of the least likely places where they would expand or start a new business. As the state has scrambled for more revenues it has grown ever more assertive and business-unfriendly. Financial executives polled by CFO Magazine have rated the state’s finance department as one of the three most unpredictable and least fair among the states.

3.  JUST SAY WHOA.  Further endearing him to conservatives everywhere, Marco Rubio leaps to catch a falling Nancy Reagan.

In the Pews

1.  WITH OUR COMPLEMENTS.  In Part 2 of Her.meneutics’ series on the gender debates, Russell Moore defends complementarianism, or the view that men and women are called to different but equally valuable roles in marriage.  The assignment of spiritual headship to men, he argues, actually empowers women, and egalitarians and complementarians can find common cause in fighting many factors demeaning women, such as pornography and our pornographic culture.

2.  EVOLVING FAITH.  John Mark Reynolds on Rick Perry’s evolution comments, and the broader issues of evolution, Darwinism and creationism:

Governor Perry wants to leave room for God. Darwinism does not, but evolution can if understood modestly. Internet atheists will be eager to confuse this issue, as will a few religious believers, but there is an important issue here.

Schools should teach the scientific consensus, but not smuggle secularism or Darwinism in with it. They do and it should stop. If these discussions cannot take place in science class, then there should be a good class in philosophy offered.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

3.  MAHANEY AFFIRMED.  For those who have been following the story of the accusations made against C. J. Mahaney, his confession to certain sins and faults, his leave of absence as President of Sovereign Grace Ministries, and the independent inquiry into the whole situation: a preliminary hearing, examining only whether Mahaney is unfit to continue working as a pastor while the inquiry proceeds, on the basis of the sins to which he has already confessed, has found that Mahaney is not unfit.  The broader inquiry will continue, but the preliminary inquiry found that he is fit to continue preaching in spite of the sins to which he has confessed.  Read more here.

Filed Under: Morning Report Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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