Comparing Christmas Speeches: Queen Elizabeth, President Obama, and Ronald Reagan

January 9, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple

Sometimes I wish we belonged to the British Commonwealth.  Watching this video was one of those times:

From there, on The Royal Channel on Facebook (how fantastic is that?), one can see Queen Elizabeth’s first Christmas broadcast, from 1957.  It’s fascinating, and worth your time.

All of this led me to want to compare President Obama.  Putting all potential cynical comments aside, I have to applaud him for a nice speech at the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.  Here’s the relevant portion:

It is, to be sure, a watered-down version of the meaning of Christmas.  Christ is a “manifestation of God’s love” who “taught us to love God and others like ourselves.”  This is true enough, of course, as far as it goes.  It says nothing about trusting in Christ for our salvation, or about the divinity of Christ, but that’s understandable given the circumstances.  Still, it makes me miss the Ronald, who affirmed the uniqueness and divinity of Christ in his 1981 address:

Oh, Ronaldus Magnus.  How we miss thee.

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Political Quotes of the Day: Debt-Ceiling and Standard and Poor's Special Edition

August 8, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

I’m going to begin a series that I’ll try to post every day.  It will be called Quotes of the Day.  It will take quotations from both sides of the aisle, and link to some of the better commentary on the day.  The viewpoints represented below are not necessarily (and in some cases obviously not) my own.  Enjoy:

Senator Tom Coburn: “For decades, political careerism has trumped statesmanship in Washington,” Coburn said in a statement yesterday. “Both parties have done what is safe, not what is right. The dysfunction in Washington is the belief that we can live beyond our means forever. We can’t.”  Link.

Former Senator Alan Simpson, on the S&P downgrade: “It ought to push [Congress] more toward reality and the reality is if you spend a buck and borrow 41 cents, you have to be very stupid.”  Link.

Robert Samuelson: “Although Obama said he was willing to trim ‘entitlements’ — presumably, Social Security and Medicare — he never laid out specific proposals or sought public support for them…Even if Obama had been more aggressive, he probably wouldn’t have carried most liberals, who adamantly oppose cuts. They regard Social Security and Medicare as sacrosanct. Not a penny is to be trimmed from benefits.  This is an extreme, even fanatical stance. Social Security and Medicare do create a safety net for many millions of poor and near-poor retirees. But for millions of wealthier retirees, they are handouts. Liberals’ unwillingness to admit and act on this distinction has long stifled meaningful budget debate. This would have doomed a bigger agreement.”  Link.

Paul Krugman: “Before downgrading U.S. debt, S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury. Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’s calculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should have gotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong — and downgraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis from its report.”  Link.

Walter Russell Mead, commenting on the New York Times’ apparent astonishment that Rick Perry and others at ‘The Response’ prayed to Jesus Christ: “Shocking.  And in Texas. What next?  High school football players praying before a big game?  Coaches praying with them, even though their salaries are paid by taxpayers?  Clearly, we are just one short step from witch burnings and a worse-than-Iranian theocracy.”  Link.

John P. Judis, demonstrating he’s never actually read Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: “Some economists and conservative politicians have swallowed the laissez-faire Kool-Aid, and simply don’t get it. In some quarters, rampant confusion prevails. But with a liberal like Klein, I suspect that despair—what Kierkegaard called ‘the sickness unto death’—over getting Congress to agree to a dramatic boost in government spending is really behind his thinking there is no economic solution.”  Link.

Leonard J. Pitts: “It is time Obama quit being surprised by the predictable, time he understood this is not politics as usual, not Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill snarling at one another by day and having drinks by night, like that old cartoon where the sheepdog and the coyote punch a time clock to signal the beginning and end of their hostilities. It is not Bill Clinton living in a state of permanent investigation, nor even George W. Bush being called incompetent all day every day. No, this is a new thing, repulsion at a visceral, indeed, mitochondrial, level. Obama’s denigrators are appalled by the newness of him, the liberality of him, the exoticness of him and, yes, and the blackness of him.  Link.

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The Circle of Protection, Poverty, Obama v. Romney, and Aaron Rodgers: The Morning Report

July 21, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

In the News

1.  ”Christian Coalition Asks Obama to Protect the Poor During Meeting.”  There’s a lot to say about this.  On the surface it’s a simple matter: of course the budget should not be balanced “on the backs of the poor.”  Underneath the surface, it’s not so simple.  What if some programs designed to meet the needs of the poor are inefficient or counter-productive?  Can we not cut those because it looks bad?  Or is it really a “cut” if you’re just marking a smaller increase in spending than what had been planned?  Also, what does a meeting like this really accomplish, apart from its obvious PR value for the Obama reelection campaign?

I’m not pretending I know the answers to all of those questions, but those are the questions that run through my mind.  Especially when I read things like this, from Galen Carey: “I talked about the importance of fiscal responsibility, which the president articulated very clearly, so we’re with him on that.”  Except the budgets the President has put forward have been the exact opposite of fiscal responsibility, and – apart from self-serving leaks – he has not actually put forward a fiscally responsible budget…well, ever.  The President has consistently resisted calls for fiscal responsibility, and then swoops in and begins attacking Republicans for being fiscally irresponsible.  I fear that folks like Galen Carey just became unwitting props in a campaign event.

2.  An explosive new report is released on poverty.  “Regrettably, most discussions of poverty in the U.S. rely on sensationalism, exaggeration, and misinformation,” says Robert Rector, author of the report. “But an effective anti-poverty policy must be based on an accurate assessment of actual living conditions and the causes of deprivation.”

3.  Public Policy Polling, a Democratic outfit that typically shows the most favorable results for Democrats, now has Obama losing to Romney.  Obama’s position, it says, is “perilous.”  Most interesting are some of the details:

An extremely wide electability gap has developed between Romney and all the rest of the Republican candidates. Everyone else we tested trails Obama by at least as much as John McCain’s 2008 margin of defeat and in most cases more. Obama’s up 7 on Michele Bachmann at 48-41, 9 against Tim Pawlenty at 48-39, 12 versus Herman Cain at 48-36, and as usual has his largest lead in a match up with Sarah Palin at 53-37.

Here’s an important note on all of this early 2012 polling though: Obama’s numbers are worse than they appear to be on the surface. The vast majority of the undecideds in all of these match ups disapprove of the job Obama’s doing but aren’t committing to a candidate yet while they wait to see how the Republican field shakes out.

In other words, in a head-to-head matchup with a credible Republican candidate, Obama would do even worse than their figures suggest, because undecideds disapprove of Obama 61%/21%.  They’re just waiting to see whether the GOP puts forward a credible candidate.  Romney continues to fare the best – by far – with independents.

In the Pews

1.  Mike Anderson, “Four Things I’ve Learned About God Through My Baby Who Was Born Blind.”  Painful and profound stuff.  A selection:

As a new father it’s painful to see my beautiful little baby and know that she can’t see me. The depth of the spiritual blindness that God’s creation are born with is even deeper than what I’m feeling. God is not indifferent to our plight. I am relieved that I’m not alone in my care for my baby. The God of the universe grieves.

Read the whole thing.

2.  John Fea writes an excellent piece at Patheos on how Christian intellectuals need to step outside of the ivory tower and into the public square.

3.  Did you know that Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is a devoted believer?  Neither did I.

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Neville Longbottom, Barack Obama, Rick Perry, Nikki Haley, Joy Behar, and Jim Wallis: The Morning Report

July 15, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

Friday Morning Palate Cleanser: I don’t typically link to gossip articles, but…Pretty amazing that of all the young Harry Potter actors, the one that played Neville Longbottom has turned out to be the most handsome.  By far.

In the News

1.  In debt and Election 2012 news, Governors Rick Perry and Nikki Haley argue that now is the time to “Break the Spend and Borrow Cycle.”  Paul Krugman persists in his apoplexy over the fact that anyone would have beliefs markedly different from his own.  And Charles Krauthammer comes down hard on Obama for failing to take the debt issue seriously until, well, about a week ago – at which point he began excoriating Republicans for being unserious children:

President Obama assailed the lesser mortals who inhabit Congress for not having seriously dealt with a problem he had not dealt with at all, then scolded Congress for being even less responsible than his own children. They apparently get their homework done on time.

My compliments. But the Republican House did do its homework. It’s called a budget. Itpassed the House on April 15. The Democratic Senate has produced no budget. Not just this year, but for two years running. As for the schoolmaster in chief, he produced two 2012 budget facsimiles: The first (February) was a farce and the second (April) was empty, dismissed by the CBO as nothing but words untethered to real numbers.

Obama has run disastrous annual deficits of around $1.5 trillion while insisting for months on a “clean” debt-ceiling increase, i.e., with no budget cuts at all. Yet suddenly he now rises to champion major long-term debt reduction, scorning any suggestions of a short-term debt-limit deal as can-kicking.

The flip-flop is transparently political. A short-term deal means another debt-ceiling fight before Election Day, a debate that would put Obama on the defensive and distract from the Mediscare campaign to which the Democrats are clinging to save them in 2012.

Meanwhile, Gallup has a generic Republican candidate taking an 8-point lead over Obama (Nike Gardiner sees Obama’s prospects as increasingly “precarious“).  And the New York Times has the scoop of the decade: Rick Perry was once a Democrat!

2.  It’s the unavoidable issue today.  California schools will soon begin making a special effort, as young as Kindergarten, to tell the stories of successful and influential gays and lesbians, in the same way that schools and textbooks have made special efforts to highlight the contributions of women and ethnic minorities.  At the same time, Michele Bachmann is under fire after a man claims that the clinic her husband owns has counseled gays that they could convert through prayer to heterosexuality:

Minnesota congresswoman and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is coming under fire from mental health professionals after ABC’s “Nightline” on Monday first aired a video released by gay rights group Truth Wins Out showing a therapist at a counseling center owned by Bachmann’s husband telling a gay client that he could convert to heterosexuality through prayer. Marcus Bachmann had previously denied that his counseling center offered so-called reparative therapy, which is opposed by the American Psychological Association.

3.  Allahpundit at Hot Air calls this “the most ominous pause in modern legal history.”  He also says, “It’s the first and last time we’ll ever have a chance to say, ‘Nice job, Joy Behar.’”

It’s the first and last time we’ll ever have a chance to say, “Nice job, Joy Behar.”

In the Pews

1.  Jim Wallis offers his usual good-guys-versus-bad-guys viewpoint on budget issues:

Our country is in the midst of a clash between two competing moral visions, between those who believe in the common good, and those who believe individual good is the only good. A war has been declared on the poor, and it is a moral imperative that people of faith and conscience fight on the side of the most vulnerable.

Jim is a kind man, and he means well.  We had an interview that went haywire about a year ago, when Jim denied receiving, but had received, funding from George Soros.  He said in a phone call afterward that he had honestly been unaware, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.  There were also some bad numbers that got around, as though Jim had received a much larger amount of money from Soros than he actually had.  (Well, we don’t know what individuals might have given to Sojourners, but I believe the total from Soros to Sojourners — at least back then — came to something like $325K.)  I felt bad at how much distress it brought to Jim, and I felt bad about the false numbers (at one point, BigGovernment reported Sojourners’ total budget number as the number they had received from Soros; it was quickly corrected, but the bad numbers stayed in circulation).

I was not particularly bothered that Jim received money from Soros.  What bothered me was the way he attacked Marvin Olasky of World Magazine.  He ultimately apologized, but it was the same good-guys-and-bad-guys approach he’s put across in his writing and speaking and teaching for many years.  We’re not playing cops and robbers.  Most people on both sides of the aisle are good, intelligent, compassionate people, with different ideas about what best serves the common good.  We need to move beyond these dichotomized, assail-the-motives approaches.

2.  Motherhood is a Calling, from the Desiring God folks.

3.  Sarah Pulliam Bailey on “How Christians Warmed to Harry Potter.”  Also, if you’re looking for a review of the new Potter movie, I recommend Rebecca Cusey’s review.  My feelings on the movie were a little different, though; I’ll post them soon.

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2008 was "Change"; will 2012 be "Change it Back"? — The Morning Report, 7/12/11

July 12, 2011 By Timothy Dalrymple

In the News

1.  James Pethokoukis on what will, I’m quite sure, be the central Republican argument in the 2012 election battle:

The Republican charge is a body shot aimed right at the belly of President Barack Obama’s re-election effort: He made it worse.

No, not that White House efforts at boosting the American economy and creating jobs and “winning the future” were merely inefficient or wasteful, which they certainly were. Even Obama finally seems to understand that. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” he joked lamely at a meeting of his jobs council.

Rather, that the product of all the administration’s stimulating and regulating is an economy that’s in significantly worse competitive and productive shape than when Obama took the oath in January 2009. He was dealt a bad hand, to be sure – and then proceeded to play it badly. At least, that is what Republicans have been saying. “He didn’t cause the recession as we know,” presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in New Hampshire yesterday. “He didn’t make it better, he made things worse.”

It’s a devastating piece from Pethokoukis, who is not exactly an Obama-hater.  He assesses the results of the President’s massive stimulus and other efforts:

[Read more...]

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