Obama Believes, Obama Cares: Obama Doesn't Understand, Obama Owes

What's to be said in the big picture about BHO's utterly inept mandate that every employer who provides health insurance must provide 100% coverage of prescription contraceptives?

One, that BHO is a sincere Christian believer who doesn't really understand other people's faith perspectives. He is, in effect, a progressive Christian fundamentalist. There is no religious truth worth thinking about other than his. People who disagree need to accept what he has to say and understand that they have no choice.

Two, that BHO doesn't understand insurance or economics. That was well demonstrated by Cato's John Cochrane, who offered in WSJ about the best refutation of the left's reasoning on mandated free contraceptives, while at the same time offering a refresher on why the whole approach to health insurance in ObamaCare is so utterly, utterly bereft of economic common sense.

For more of the same, witness this week's Friday night White House news-dump: that BHO offers as a compromise that insurance companies must not "explicitly charge" Catholic organizations for the provision of contraceptives. The lunch is free, but the beer costs ten bucks. Wow. Would someone on the President's staff introduce him to the definition of the term "fungible"?

Three, the President, really, really cares about women's health. In exactly the way that the left-wing base of the Democratic Party prescribes that all Democrats care: the provision of contraception and abortion. Apparently for the political left all women do is have babies.

Of all the lame moves that this President has made--and not every move he's made has been lame--which ones were not the consequence of placating the left wing of his party? Clearly, Obama understands that he owes his success to the support of MoveOn.org and its ilk, so that whatever he does, he dare not offend them. Foreign policy has been a qualified exception, but we are hard pressed to identify others.

And we are sad to note that Obama's political strategy may well win him a second term. No GOP candidate stands much of a chance against him presently, we believe. Is it really too late to prevail upon Mitch Daniels?

Enough with the Anti-Tebow Prooftexting

SWNID hates biblical prooftexting. As if such needed to be said.

Lately, much of the prooftexting we encounter comes from those critical of conservative, evangelical or fundamentalist Christians.

And one of the latest objects of such prooftexting is St. Tim Tebow. His sin is Tebowing: kneeling in prayer on CBS and Fox.

As an egregious case in point, we quote from a recent letter to the editor in WSJ:

The problem for many, especially those having more deep understanding of Scripture, is that they see the public display of religious beliefs as both anti-Biblical and anti-Christian . . . Jesus was clear in his condemnation of public religiosity. For example, in Matthew 6:5, Jesus says (King James Version), "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward." Does that not make clear the master's view of the public display of religiosity?

Um, actually sir, whom we will not name as you are a private citizen, though your name and city will be viewed by far more who haven't read this blog than by those who have, this verse does not make the master's view as clear as that.

For in the same discourse the master says,

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven (Matthew 5:14-16 ESV).

So does Christ demand public or private religiosity? The paradoxical clash of these texts has been cited by no less than Sinclair Lewis in his celebrated anti-revivalist potboiler Elmer Gantry as an example of the Bible's self-contradiction. But it better demonstrates how approaching the Bible with an agenda different from the Bible's is a sure way to misunderstand it.

That is, our distinction between public and private as an issue of religiosity has more to do with Enlightenment views on the limits of religious truth claims than as part of Jesus' teaching. Was Jesus trying to keep people from offending others' religious sensibilities by confining devotional activity to the private sphere? Nothing suggests that such a question was close to his agenda, least of all the contents of the Sermon on the Mount in its entirety.

So what was up? Approximately summarized, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount insists that the righteousness of God's kingdom as he was inaugurating it was at once humble, sincere, mission focused, and offensive.

For the first two characteristics: righteousness is humble because it is based in one's own receipt of God's grace. Those who are blessed in God's kingdom are weak and lowly. So there's no point in trying to look better than others.

Likewise, the kingdom is God's kingdom, formed by his action and having him as sovereign. He sees what others don't. So there's no point in trying to look better than others in front of others. That's the natural outcome of acknowledging that God is king and I'm a weakling who needs mercy from God, so why would I care about looking better than other sinners?

So no acting like the righteousness-for-social-status folk. Real righteousness exceeds theirs. The hackneyed statement is that God is the only audience, though it wasn't hackneyed when Kierkegaard said it.

Yet Jesus says that righteousness is still mission-focused and so outward-looking. God is taking back his world, and the subjects of his kingdom are his means of doing that. They are salt. They are light. They will look different in public than other folk. Together they constitute a shining city on a hill, beckoning those around to join them. When their light shines, God gets glorified.

Which isn't automatic. They get persecuted, for the sake of the very righteousness that the Sermon refocuses, which is to say for Jesus' sake. There's no taking the offense out of the gospel, and it's no use to try to aim the offense to hit only the people we don't like, like rich folks or religious folks or secular-humanistic folks or "tolerant" folks.

And in all that, righteousness doesn't judge. It looks first to self, where the log in the eye must be self-removed by God's grace. But then righteousness helps remove the speck in the sibling's eye. It's about taking the world back, one eye at a time.

What does Jesus' Sermon say about St. Tim? Well, he could be shining a salty light, kneeling in humility, or he could be seeking the praise of men. Or both: people now and then admit to mixed motives. Some cry, "Lord, Lord," but don't do what the Lord says. The Lord, Tebow's judge, knows. 

But Tebow didn't ipso facto break a dominical rule by taking a knee. Jesus didn't come simply to establish the definitive boundaries of religious observance. Like doing that would require a cross.

Note to all who want to discuss the Bible in public: don't start your discourse by claiming to have a "more deep" [sic] understanding of Scripture." But if you do, ask for mercy. Logs and specks: we've all got 'em.

Maybe the Only Post Needed for 2012

The first Obama 2012 campaign ad has premiered. And if it's a harbinger of the rest of his campaign, we're in for a miserably long year.




What's wrong with this bad boy?

Ignoring the classically demagogic reference to "secretive oil billionaires," we let Investor's Business Daily tell the tale.

To wit:

• The figure cited for "clean-energy jobs" is the number of existing jobs that can be so classified.
• The number of such jobs has not been growing at the same rate as other jobs.
• The number of such jobs has declined more rapidly than others in the recession.
• Meanwhile, declines in energy imports relate to the drop in demand caused by the recession.

To which we merely add that oil imports are also declining as a percentage of oil usage because of growth in domestic production that has happened in spite of administration policies.

Then there's the claim about ethics. The lefty fact-checker cited has noted that the characterization of BHO's administration as highly ethical was withdrawn when BHO started issuing wholesale numbers waivers to ethics requirements.

Still, let's set aside the questionable assertions. These are, we must assume, the best that the Obamanoids have for 2012. Is a majority of the Electoral College prepared to cast votes in favor of clean energy and meticulous ethics, against considerations of jobs and fiscal sanity?

Most disturbing to any of the 80% of Democrats prepared to cast votes for Obama in November should be the utter congruence of the Case for Obama's 2012 Reelection with the Case for Carter's 1980 Reelection: "I'm Clean, I'm Green, and By Golly, People Like Me."

Krauthammer's Existential Dilemma, And an Ancient Alternative Hypothesis

Charles Krauthammer ends his 2011 WaPo contribs with a departure from his usual: a meditation on whether humanity is alone in the universe, and what it might mean if we are.

We insist that gentle readers follow the link and read Dr. K's thoughtful article, and we recommend that they do so before reading our remarks further. But we have no way to monitor that, so here goes.

Krauthammer notes that astronomers are busy finding "exoplanets," which has become the aspect of astronomy in which the public seems most interested since manned space flight became mundane after the lunar-landing program. And finding planets around other starts they are, in impressive quantities.

But finding signs of intelligent life in the universe, they aren't, even though that search has been going on longer than the search for exoplanets.

Krauthammer's explanation is the so-called Fermi Paradox, which asks, Why do we seem to be alone? and after calculating some astronomical odds that intelligent life would arise on other spheres, reasoning that there ought to be such intelligent life in such quantities that some signs of its presence would be available to us, then concludes that the problem is with intelligent life itself: that it inevitably destroys itself.

Dr. K's conclusion is to highlight that the oft-benighted endeavor politics is therefore of utmost importance, as it is by politics that humans manage their propensity to destroy one another.

Reading Krauthammer's essay is like reading a classic presentation of the Christian gospel, minus God. It begins with the assumption that intelligence like humans' is quite special. It is driven to the conclusion that intelligence like humans' is quite dangerous. It seeks for a solution to the danger, a way of salvation. But it lacks everything it really needs to explain the origin of the intelligent creatures, the root of the paradox of their self-destructive tendencies, and a solution that gets to the heart of the problem. All that has to come from the outside.

Politics is not as bad an answer as it sounds, really. We Christians who tend to emphasize the limits of political solutions to human problems should also recognize that the gospel we believe transforms all aspects of human life for the one who believes it, including the way that the converted person relates to others and both exercises power and responds to the exercise of power. That means that the gospel transforms the politics of the people who believe it.

For Krauthammer a key unanswerable question is why I, as an individual, should care at all whether my form of intelligent life endures or not. One can answer that the despair of our fragile, temporal existence with the insistence that our rare (but apparently oft-repeated elsewhere) existence as sentient beings needs to be preserved at all costs. That's Krauthammer's implication, and it's thin gruel, to say the least. Certainly for Fermi, whose contribution to the invention of nuclear weapons was so crucial, it seems to have been the only straw to grasp as he saw his own exceptional intelligence as the genesis of our race's self-destruction.

But what if there's more--someone who transcends the universe, who created it, who did so for human habitation (and others? well, it remains an interesting question but is now less important, for now we are certainly not alone), who understands our paradoxical existence and who acted at the greatest personal cost to address it, and so who in all ways demonstrated that he loves us with a measure that surpasses what we observe in any of our fellows?

What if the answer to our paradox is not politics but love, and not love as some kind of cosmic abstraction that can somehow exist apart from a subject and an object, but specifically the love of the triune God, who gives and receives love eternally within the triunity of his being but who decisively chose to create us, to love us unconditionally, and by that love to rescue us by becoming one of us and taking on himself everything that we experience and, by our stubborn, self-destructive rebellion, even deserve?

Sounds more promising than politics alone.

Mitt Leads Barack by More Than Margin of Error

Don't measure the curtains for the Lincoln Bedroom yet, but Our Man Mitt is beating BHO in the latest Rasmussen, 45% to 39%.

Given Mitt's steady hand on the tiller so far, we doubt very much that the incumbent will be able to reverse this early trend, though we do expect ups and downs from here.

Yes, Mitt is eerily like Thomas Dewey, so 1948 does come to mind. But Obama is about as far from Harry Truman as one can get.

Meanwhile, Mitt is demonstrating that no one will hold support in the GOP primaries other than Mitt. That includes especially Ron Paul, about whom WSJ's Daniel Henninger says the obvious today (as someone else will tomorrow): that Paul is a kook with no chance of responsible public office (being a Congressman who votes alone is not a responsible position, of course).

Brooks on Historical Analogies, SWNID on Echo Chambers

David Brooks holds his ground today at the Gray Lady, nicely detailing reasons to insist that our era is like neither the Great Depression nor the Progressive Era, the two historical models used by the Obama White House as metanarratives for their anemic political agenda.

We find Brooks' analysis trenchant. Hence we note it here.

But we also find the comments from Times readers to be, well, depressing. Post after post repeats the hackneyed talking-points of leftist lemmings: the Rs wrecked government, "smaller government" means returning to social anarchy, Reagan did it, Bush did it, it's the 1% . . . all that. Some insist that Brooks is a toady of the right-wing propaganda machine.

Well, that's kinda funny, actually, as Brooks points to issues that aren't exactly being addressed thoughtfully by most Republican pols either. Right now the fight seems to be over who knows what Reagan's ghost would do. Conservatives' historical analogies are also suspect when employed simplistically, without attention to differences as well as similarities in different eras.

But the Times' readers, probably hailed by the paper's salesmen to prospective advertisers as the best educated newspaper readers in the world, can't engage such thoughts. For them, Brooks simply violates self-evident orthodoxies and so must be stupid, evil, credulous or all three.

It's been widely observed that as developed countries become more mobile, people's experiences of social difference become less frequent. Most people these days live, work and play with people of very similar backgrounds, economic conditions and opinions. That leads to the kind of bald ignorance of other points of view that one sees in most comments sections on most opinion pieces in most internet publications these days.

So why do we pick on the Times? Because the Times postures as the elite organ of news and analysis, the newspaper of the moral and intellectual 1%. As if thoughtful conservatives were unicorns.

Hitch 3:16

Like his hero, Orwell, Christopher prized bravery above all other qualities--and in particular the bravery required for unflinching honesty. And as was true of the work of Orwell, the former colonial policeman, this devotion paradoxically lent a certain military coloring to Christopher's intellectual, literary, and political pursuits. This most intellectual of men valued intelligence, but valued courage far more--or rather, he believed that true intellect was inseparable from courage.

So writes Atlantic editor Benjamin Schwartz in his obituary for the celebrated essayist Christopher Hitchens.


We want to comment on what Schwartz observes in the quotation above, from the standpoint of Hitchens' celebrated-and-scorned atheism, and his "last word" on the subject of death in Vanity Fair, in which he stood down from much of the bravado about death that he had expressed in word and deed in former days.


We think that this contrast--between holding courage sacred and experiencing mortality as dissolution of oneself--contains the essence Hitchens' inability to find faith. It is this: weakness, not courage, is the basis on which one turns to God.


Hitchens sought, lived and revered courage. In the end he could not escape weakness. No one does.

But to act on weakness, one must abandon courage: "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Another Voice Joins SWNID in the Interdisciplinary Wilderness

SWNID famously champions the notion that good education is deliberately interdisciplinary.

And so does everyone else, until the subject of science education comes up. Then suddenly, the conversation takes a dark turn: the science classroom should teach nothing other than science.

Of course, that never happens. It's a means of excluding the larger metaphysical questions about origins, questions leading to discussion of God, from the conversation. So you can't follow the discussion of evolution with any of the three questions that evolution appears incapable of answering: (a) why is there something instead of nothing? (b) why is there life and not just non-life? (c) why are there self-conscious humans capable of pondering such questions?

Enter Ari Eisen of Emory University's Center for Ethics, on CNN's Belief Blog. His gravid voice asks whether there's ever been a significant conversation about science that didn't touch on issues that belong to other areas of inquiry, like ethics and religion. He wonders whether students are less attracted to science as a way of knowing precisely because it's presented as a body of facts independent of significance. He points to data suggesting that students learn science better when they are challenged to see its relationship to other considerations. He notes well that the neglect of larger questions does not make those questions go away in the minds of students and the public--that people persist in their belief that scientific data and religious ideas are somehow compatible.

We are pretty sure that Eisen would be given a very unscientific cold shoulder were he to present his views at any major conference of natural scientists. Too bad for everyone.

The 2012 Election in a Sentence

The polls announce grim news for BHO and Democrats. Significant majorities reject the President's handling of the economy, saying that he doesn't deserve a second term. Included in the latter is one in five self-identified Democrats.

Therefore, listen well to this longish sequence from MSNBC's Morning Joe, ostensibly a daily pep-rally for the left. The mood is somber, not least when GOP solon Peggy Noonan agrees with remarks from her Democrat counter parts that many Democrats have vowed to vote for the Republican, regardless of who the Republican is.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, the election in a sentence:

Republicans win unless they blow it.