Bush Hatred Prevails Over Obama Love

December 22, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

A presidency that began with such hope and optimism, and such astronomical approval and support, may well end in the utter collapse of the modern liberal program.

I’m sure that sounds like an overstatement, and perhaps it is.  2012 will be no cakewalk for Republicans, and they’re fully capable of bungling the opportunity history has given them.  But if Obama is defeated, then it will be one of the most stunning turnarounds in the history of modern politics.  Consider: George W. Bush entered his first term with a roughly 55% approval rating (averaging the various polls) and left it with about a 47.5% approval rating — a drop of 7.5% over the course of four years full of dissension, accusation and mockery.  Obama began his first term with 65% approval ratings and has stood below 45% for the majority of the past four months — a drop of 20%, nearly three times the Bush figure.

Yet Bush, whatever his virtues, was not an effective spokesperson for modern conservatism.  If a handsome, eloquent, highly intelligent and charismatic African-American Democrat with a charming family, who came to office with both houses of Congress and a historic groundswell of public support and abundant permission to blame his early struggles on the financial crisis and the Bush administration, cannot achieve more than this, then modern American liberalism will need resuscitation.  It should be sobering to progressives that the consummate representation of modern American liberalism is neither effective nor loved.  More Americans (7 out of 10) believe America is on the wrong track now than they did at the time of his inauguration.

Ironically, the roots of Obama’s failure do lay in the Bush administration — but not in the way progressives think.  It was not so much the Bush administration, as it was liberal hatred of the Bush administration, that set Obama up for failure.

Throughout the eight years of the Bush administration, it was almost an article of faith on the Hard Left that anything the dreaded “King George” decreed was not only unwise and unnecessary, but immoral, irrational, and probably illegal, motivated not by cold facts and prudence but by cowboy-ish jingoism, the profits of the military-industrial complex and an enduring theocratic impulse.  With foreign policy, military actions, homeland security, and the economy, there was precious little need for careful examination of the rationale for Bush administration decisions.  If Bush did it, it was foolish and probably criminal, because Bush was not motivated by reason and love for country but by greed and war-lust and a crude evangelical superstitions.

So what do you do when your liberal savior extends and even expands the great majority of those policies?

Consider all the ways in which the Obama administration has continued the policies of the Bush administration, even policies that liberals, including Obama himself, excoriated when Bush was President.  Obama sought to repeat the success of the Iraq Surge with an Afghanistan Surge, and ramped up the kind of drone strikes (not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but even in places like Yemen) that liberals once lamented.  Where the Left once mocked Bush’s Freedom Agenda in the Middle East, the Arab Spring has indeed blossomed, and the Obama administration has been no less interventionist that their predecessors, though they’ve been able to stand behind national rebels in a manner similar to the initial Bush incursion into Afghanistan (with similarly ambiguous results so far).  And for all the talk of a “reset” in diplomatic relations, the early Obama overtures to our enemies produced no significant results — the kumbaya strategy got us nowhere — and the same tensions and disputes have reasserted themselves with Russia, China, North Korea, Syria and many other nations.  Thus writers at The Nation claim “the Bush-Obama presidency has sufficient self-coherence to be considered a historical entity with a life of its own.”

On homeland defense and civil freedoms, the Obama administration has defended warrantless wiretapping and continued extraordinary renditions.  In spite of the campaign promises, Guantanamo is still open.  The most severe of the Enhanced Interrogation techniques had already been discontinued, and as one CIA official says, “the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations.”  The same programs that the Obama campaign had once attacked where “all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.”  The Obama administration not only endorsed the once-reviled Patriot Act, but they’ve extended the national surveillance apparatus and increased government power to detain American citizens indefinitely without trial.  So progressives complain that “Obama has maintained or expanded all civil rights violations Bush started.”

Even on the economy, Bush cut taxes in the midst of an economic slowdown, and Obama has essentially done the same — ont only extending the Bush tax cuts but adding other, non-income-tax cuts (payroll tax cuts, Making Work Pay tax cuts, etc.).  Obamacare will bring tax increases in 2018, but thus far Obama speaks of raising taxes on the rich while in fact he’s not yet done so.  All rhetoric aside, even Obama recognizes that raising taxes in the midst of a recession, at least in most tax brackets, is a bad idea.  And there are other examples.  Much though Obama likes to take credit for pulling the economy back from the precipice, the economy had already drawn back from the precipice by the time he came to office, and Obama not only continued many of the policies from the Bush economic team, he kept much of the team in place.  The corporate, capital gains and dividend rates have all remained the same.  And the same banks and trading houses that were discovered to be dangerously large in the 2008 financial meltdown are now larger than ever and turning massive profits again.

There are exceptions, of course, with Obamacare being the biggest.  Yet even Obamacare is not the single-payer, nationalized plan that liberals (including Obama himself) had publicly pined for — and Obamacare or large portions of it may very well be dismantled or ruled un-Constitutional.  Obama’s stimulus directed massive amounts of funds to the Democrat’s favored constituencies, but it proved so contentious and ineffective that the word “stimulus” is now radioactive.  Obama’s treatment of GM was shameful, the Democrat’s mis-regulation of the financial sector has slowed the recovery, and the Obama Justice Department has been negligent on matters of religious freedoms.  More exceptions come on issues like abortion, gay rights, unemployment benefits (it’s unlikely the Bush administration would have favored two years of unemployment payments), and of course Supreme Court appointments.  It does matter whether there is a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.  But there’s no question that the Obama administration has been far less different from the Bush administration than was promised during the campaign.

What’s so astonishing, though, is not that Obama has extended so many controversial Bush administration policies but the way in which his erstwhile supporters have responded.  They face (at least) two options:

  1. Barack Obama is a sellout, “just Bush with a tan,” subservient to the same malevolent political and economic forces that Bush was.
  2. OR the Bush administration was actually pretty reasonable to adopt these policies in the first place, and the Obama administration has been reasonable enough to recognize the fact.

Both options require the liberal to admit a mistake: either he was wrong about Obama, or he was wrong about Bush.  But the first option requires the liberal to sacrifice his love for Obama, while the second option requires him to sacrifice his hatred of Bush.  Either Obama was dishonest in the campaign or overwhelmed by baleful influences once he came to the Oval Office — or Obama, once he came to the White House and had the same information and responsibility that Bush had, came to more or less the same conclusions as Bush had.

Unsurprisingly, Option #1 comes out the huge winner here.  So powerful is the partisan mindset that I haven’t seen a single prominent liberal writer take Option #2.  They puzzle through the “mystery” of “George W. Obama” and conclude that the contradictions between Obama’s ideals and actions compose “a subtle disaster for all those whose hopes once rested with him.”  They would rather abandon their love of Obama than their hatred of Bush.  To put it more sharply: they are so deeply committed to the nefariousness and malfeasance of the Bush administration that they would rather believe Barack Obama a failure, a liar or a dupe than believe that George W. Bush took reasonable actions in light of the circumstances.

For instance, when the Bush administration signaled its intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) in a military tribunal instead of a criminal court, the liberal commentariat cried havoc and accused Bush of destroying the American Constitution.  Senator Obama voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and frequently spoke against military commissions and in favor of federal courts of a military courts-martial.  Yet the Obama team quickly abandoned its flirtation with the criminal courts idea and eventually resumed the very same military commissions he had once decried.  Rather than reexamine her view that the military commissions approach was idiotic, immoral and unnecessary, Dahlia Lithwick insisted that the administration had “revers[ed] one of its last principled positions” and “surrendered to the bullying, fear-mongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law.”

The same story could be told with dozens of other examples.  Progressives could have concluded that their earlier opposition to Bush administration policies was misguided.  Instead they’ve consistently concluded that “Obama and the Democrats have completely sold out by any measure.”

What the consistencies between the Bush and Obama administrations mean, of course, is that there are broad swaths of consensus in the foreign policy establishment and in the economic policy establishment regarding what best serves the interests of the United States internationally and economically.  There is a hyper-partisan paralysis on some matters, but on many matters, in spite of claims to the contrary, there is a general consensus (which is not to say that it’s right) on the course to take.  And while it’s easy to inveigh against a President from the opposite party when you’re trying to get elected, when you are the decider, when you face the same intelligence and the same responsibilities as your predecessor, you may find that your former criticisms fade away and your predecessor’s course of action begins to look mighty reasonable.

The legacy of the Left’s extreme Bush hatred, which led them to caricature Bush and scorn and misrepresent the great majority of his policies, policies they otherwise might have found reasonable, has had profound consequences for Obama.  First, when he takes the same course of action that Bush took, however pragmatic it might be, he looks like a sellout to his most ardent supporters and he looks spineless or unprincipled to moderates.  They begin to ask: What does Obama really stand for?  Thus, second, Obama lost, quite early in his administration, a President’s most precious commodity: the trust of the American people.  They no longer knew whether he said what he meant and meant what he said.  And third, this puts him in a tough position entering the election contest.  Obama can deliver the same soaring speeches, but soaring speeches swiftly turn sour when the speaker’s actions contradict his words.

As I’ve written before, the problem with the Obama administration is not the salesmanship; it’s that America no longer trusts that the salesman really believes in what he’s selling.  When hope and change was your mantra the first time around, I really mean it this time is not an inspiring followup.

Filed Under: politics, Politics and Economics, The Obama Presidency Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Reconsidering Bush’s “Compassionate” Conservatism

October 20, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

After I had read his book, The Man in the Middle, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Goeglein, who from 2001 to 2008 was one of George W. Bush’s longest-serving aides, as Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison.  I was struck in particular by his testament to the president’s compassion.  Although he famously flubbed his lines in speeches, and some of his Bush-isms are now a part of our common tongue (like strategiary and misunderestimated), Bush was deeply loved by those who worked with him.  People were not only impressed by his ability to glad-handle and work a room (as they were with Clinton), but by the genuine care and grace the President demonstrated in his relationships with them.

Personally, I’ve sometimes wondered whether “compassionate conservatism” came out, in effect, to big-government conservatism.  I no longer think that’s the case.  Although Bush expanded government spending, he often directed that spending in ways that did not further bloat the government bureaucracy but, instead, empowered churches and ministries and other organizations in the private sector to do their work.  In those cases where he did permanently expand government entitlements, I think he was genuinely trying to help — and was ill-served by some of his political aides.  Please consider the following parts of the interview, including the author’s stunning story of sin and forgiveness:

George W. Bush

The catch phrase, when President Bush first came to office in 2000, was “compassionate conservatism.” Do you think President Bush lived that out?

In my present role with Focus on the Family, I had to be up in South Africa earlier this year. Everywhere I went, whether for business meetings or ministry meetings, I was amazed at how highly regarded George W. Bush is in Africa. That’s a direct result of his compassionate conservatism and his historic work battling AIDS and malaria there. The President’s PEPFAR initiative against AIDS, and his anti-malarial program, stand among his most significant foreign policy achievements, and yet they’re little known or appreciated now, at least in the United States. I hope they will be recognized over time.

It’s worth revisiting what the President said when he spoke, in his first inaugural address, about the parable that Jesus told of the road to Jericho. The meaning of compassion stands at the very heart of that parable. The Priest and the Levite walk directly past the man who’s been injured and stripped naked. The Good Samaritan crosses the highway to help the man and pays for his care. Jesus says that the Good Samaritan had “compassion” on the injured man. We understand that in Christian scripture as having true mercy.

This is what George W. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism. It’s not that the federal government was going to come in and supply every need. Just the opposite. When George W. Bush gave one of the most important speeches of his Presidency, at Notre Dame, he was specifically countering Lyndon Johnson’s notion of the Great Society…What he wanted to do, and what was at the heart of compassionate conservatism, was to advance mercy and compassion by removing an institutional bigotry within the federal bureaucracy against faith-based programs that were turned away just because they were faith-based. George W. Bush made clear that the federal government was not going to buy the Bibles or the crucifixes, but they could further the good work that these faith-based organizations were doing.

And he was right. The private sector, the intermediary institution, the concept of subsidiarity, these were so important to President Bush. He believed in this mission, believed that faith-based groups were often addressing social ills more compassionately and more effectively than the government could do. Removing the institutional bigotry against faith-based programs was exactly the right thing to do.

So “compassionate conservatism” wasn’t just a campaign slogan to get him elected?

George W. Bush was sincerely one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met. I saw this on multiple occasions. He treated the lowest staffer with the same respect he did a king, a queen, or a pope or prime minister. This was a direct result of his faith.

As you know, the first chapter of The Man in the Middle is about the grace and mercy and compassion he showed to me in a way that was very personal and, in the political classes, rather unparalleled. When you embarrass the president, the vice president, or the like, you immediately become persona non grata. They need to hold you at a great distance. You’re simply not invited to the White House and extended grace and compassion in the way the President did to me.

What I’m saying is, George W. Bush’s faith shaped not only his foreign and domestic policies but also the very basic ways in which he treated people. He had this gift and ability to connect with real people regardless of their station in life. It was indeed a very compassionate conservatism that he represented.

What do you say to those who assert that “compassionate conservatism” was code for “big-government conservatism”?

George W. Bush never spoke in code. George W. Bush is that rare politician—and I have worked in Washington for nearly twenty-five years, I’ve walked with the princes of this world—he is that rare politician who is the same in private as in public. He says what he means and means what he says.

Compassionate conservatism was not a euphemism or code. It represented, and represents, precisely who he was and is, as a result of his faith. It really was dramatized in George W. Bush’s visit (when he was Governor) to a prison in Texas where Chuck Colson and Prison Fellowship had become very active. The President saw the results of their ministry, and the way that their work was impacting these otherwise-very-hardened criminals. A seed was planted. George W. Bush came to see that there was an absolutely critical role for faith-based and community groups. They were the “little platoons” doing the most important work. He resolved that when he came to the Oval Office, he would take that model or paradigm and apply it nationally.

Compassionate conservatism was George W. Bush’s character and it was his commitment. It was not code or an effort to be clever.

You had your own experience of sin and grace when a reporter discovered that some words in unpaid pieces you wrote for a newspaper had been taken from other sources. You describe this in your book without flinching. What happened? How does someone in the White House, especially someone as savvy as yourself, start down that road? And how did the President respond when this came to his attention?

I’m pleased to be asked about this. Proverbs is correct: Pride goes before the fall. But in the words of T. S. Eliot, “humility is endless.”

In my time in the White House, I was becoming a very prideful person. This pride and vanity extended to plagiarizing columns for my hometown newspaper. I was not writing about politics, but about many other things that interested me. Pride takes many forms, and one of them is always wanting to be the brightest guy, the one with something interesting to say. I began plagiarizing these columns. I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was wrong.

One morning I came to work at the White House and when I opened my email I found a reporter asking whether this was true that I had plagiarized these columns. I literally fell to the side of my desk. I prayed, “Oh God, oh God.” I knew right away that the world as I had known it was over on that day. I felt, as I say in The Man in the Middle, that my world was collapsing. By return email, I told the reporter that it was entirely true, and I was guilty as charged. I had no one to blame but myself.

There are, in this world, two kinds of crises. One is where it’s beyond your control, and another is where you’re directly responsible. I was directly responsible, without excuse. I inflicted, as a result of my own sin, shame and embarrassment on the President, and on my colleagues and mentors. I had violated everything I believed in, and was a hypocrite to my wife and children and family. Categorically. So I resigned from the White House that day. That was on a Friday.

On a Monday, I came back to the White House to begin clearing out my desk and taking the pictures off the walls. I received a call from Josh Bolton, who had become a friend from the first Bush campaign when we met in Austin, Texas. Josh was now the Chief of Staff, and he said he wanted to see me. I presumed that would be the proverbial “woodshed” moment, which I thoroughly deserved.

The first thing he asked me was, “How are your wife and boys doing?” Then he extended to me his forgiveness. I was genuinely shocked and deeply moved by this. We spent a considerable amount of time together, and before I departed his office he said, “By the way, the boss wants to see you.”

So surely this, I thought, would be the woodshed moment, and again I completely deserved it. I expected other people to be there, but when I got to the Oval Office the only other person there was the executive assistant. I thought I must have come on the wrong day—but the President called me in. I thought: This is going to be really bad. I went in and closed the door.

I turned to him to apologize, but barely got the words out before he looked me in the eyes and said, “Tim, I forgive you.” To say I was stunned would be an understatement. I tried again to apologize, but he wouldn’t let me. He said, “Tim, I’ve known grace and mercy in my life. I’m extending it to you. You’re forgiven.”

I said, “You should have thrown me into Pennsylvania Avenue.” Again he said, “My friend, you’re forgiven. We can talk about all of this, or we can talk about the last eight years.”

I turned to sit on the couch in the Oval Office, but he directed me to the seat of honor beneath the portrait of Washington, where Heads of State sit. I sat there, and he and I had a conversation about two remarkable presidential campaigns, and what was at that point about seven-and-a-half years in the White House. I was by then one of the longest serving aides to the President. We embraced, and I thought this was the last time I would see George W. Bush. As I turned to head out, though, he said, “I want you to bring your wife and boys here, so I can tell them what a great job you’ve done.”

I was stunned and speechless. The leader of the free world, the most powerful man on earth, wanted to affirm me before my wife and children. Sure enough, my wife and boys came, the President gave them a great amount of time in the Oval Office and gave them gifts. We were invited back to the White House as a family on subsequent occasions. We were there at Andrews Air Force Base for his departure. I’ve seen the President a number of times in Texas and he’s never mentioned it again. So, in my mind, George W. Bush is and was grace personified.

So to go back to your earlier question about compassion: I was the wounded man on the side of the highway. I was totally and completely guilty and undeserving of the President’s forgiveness, and yet he gave it to me without reservation. He extended grace to me at the lowest point in my life.

Filed Under: Christian Approach to Politics, Christians in Government Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Reassessing George W Bush – Interview with Tim Goeglein, Part 1

October 19, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Tim Goeglein

On the sixteenth of September, I interviewed Timothy Goeglein, author of The Man in the Middle, who served for nearly eight years as President George W. Bush’s liaison to conservatives. In the middle of one of his clear and elegant sentences, my wife entered my office and informed me that her water had broken and it was time to get to a hospital for the birth of our second daughter. “I have to go!” I said.

Goeglein cheerfully noted that, as a father himself and now a the primary advocate in Washington for Focus on the Family, this was “music to his ears.” We resumed our interview the following week.

Few apart from Goeglein are able to provide an insider’s account of all, or almost all, of the Bush years. While The Man in the Middle is written from the perspective of a sincere admirer, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of a Presidential administration, and perhaps the most careful and sympathetic vision of George W. Bush apart from the President’s own memoir, Decision Points. Also, the most profound reason for the author’s admiration of the President is easy to understand, and clear from the beginning — the extraordinary grace that George W. Bush extended to him when Goeglein confessed to plagiarizing a series of opinion pieces he had given his hometown newspaper. On one level, it’s hard to understand why someone who stands in the midst of such great — and public — success would risk it all by plagiarizing for opinion pieces for a hometown paper. On the other hand, Goeglein’s story follows a classic arc of triumph, pride, sin, contrition and restoration, against the backdrop of wars and campaigns and world-changing decisions.

Tomorrow, Patheos will publish the interview as a whole — and I will begin to post selections of the interview here, with my own reflections.  Come back tomorrow for “Was George W. Bush Really a Compassionate Conservative?”

 

Filed Under: Christians in Government 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: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Political Quotes of the Day: Sacred Spending Cows, Rick Perry's God, and Blame the Tea Party

August 10, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Quotations are offered not because I agree or disagree with them, but as points of departure for continued reflection.

Ed Morrisey (a couple days ago):

There is a lot of anger at the moment in the US over the embarrassment of the downgrade, as well as shock.  I’m most amused by the shock, to tell the truth.  S&P didn’t say anything yesterday that was not common knowledge and common sense.  If you had to rate a potential investment that had an income of, say, $22,000 a year but had costs of $37,000 per year, a standing debt of $143,000, and contracted future debt that exceeded $1 million, would you give that investment a gold-plated AAA rating and buy their bonds at the lowest interest rate possible, or at all?  Of course not, but that’s exactly the fiscal situation of the US, at a 100,000,000:1 scale.

Steven Malanga:

Some of the hyperbolic rhetoric we are now hearing about efforts to trim the deficit is coming from advocacy groups warning that much of our cutting will fall on the poor. These advocates frequently use the plight of the poor to inveigh against cuts in programs that don’t accomplish anything. We spend several billion dollars a year on community development block grants that originated decades ago as naïve, if somewhat well-intentioned efforts to restore declining neighborhoods. Over the years, however, Congress expanded the program to richer communities and gradually made it into a haven for member earmarks. When in 2006 the Bush administration actually proposed refocusing the grants on poor neighborhoods and redesigning them so that groups would need to show some evidence their programs helped ameliorate poverty, the advocacy community and members of Congress in both parties revolted, refusing to consider any such evidenced-based grantmaking.

Some programs are so sacrosanct the media can’t bring itself to confront the evidence that they don’t work. Head Start has been the subject of much study by academics who’ve found the program doesn’t do what it is supposed to, that is, give lower income kids a good educational head start. The government keeps commissioning studies hoping to change that, but when the latest study sponsored by Health and Human Services was released in 2010 again showing there were no lasting educational effects of the program, the media virtually ignored it. And so, $100 billion later, we continue to fund a program that fails to accomplish its purpose.

J.E. Dyer:

Much of what we try to do with government today is an attempt to replicate through human means what God has provided through a relationship with Him. As the Christians for a Sustainable Economy initiative suggested last week, a key question posed in that endeavor is: “Whom shall we indebt?” That is, who is on the hook for the cost of making good on those promises? God holds Himself obligated already, but rather than doing things His way, we make up earthly systems that indenture our fellow men to our needs, preferences, and even caprices.

David Sessions:

Perry and his fellow religious-right candidates for the GOP presidential nomination may genuinely believe their messianic notions are private matters, that they can preach to 30,000 fellow believers about re-installing God as the invisible leader of the nation and still not be seen primarily as prophets of a reactionary political theology. They may be right. Evidence suggests that the mainstream press only comprehends them as kooky, delusional, and perhaps provincial figures, rather than rational actors with ideas fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy. But that is what they are—a reality made all the more tragic by the fact that the contradictions of liberal democracy created them.

Barbara Ehrenreich:

The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.

Jay Cost:

The recession may be the political fault of George W. Bush, but the Democrats must take the blame for the disappointing recovery, for it was they who had total control of the federal government in 2009 and 2010.

And the Democrats are set to pay for it – big time. Goldman Sachs recently revised its 2012 economic forecast; it now sees growth ranging between 2 percent and 2.5 percent next year, and unemployment edging up to 9.25 percent. If this forecast turns out to be accurate, then Barack Obama will lose next year by a large margin, and scores of congressional Democrats will follow him down to defeat.

So, party leaders are in a full-blown panic, and rightly so. They are desperate to turn the public’s gaze away from their own shortcomings, and no doubt some too-clever-by-half pollster or focus group hack suggested blaming the Tea Party.

Filed Under: Political Quotes of the Day Tagged With: , , , , ,