Those other issues certainly affect a country’s safety, prosperity, and greatness. But I’ve come to believe that a nation that tolerates destruction of innocents deserves neither safety nor prosperity nor greatness. We’ve descended into barbarism, and it poisons how we treat the elderly, the incapacitated, even ourselves. We shouldn’t be surprised, having made life a utilitarian calculation, that more and more humans become inconvenient.
It’s certainly true that there are other issues that ought to concern Christians, like the sanctity of marriage, and how we treat the mentally ill, the elderly, and children who have been born. But abortion is, in my view, the touchstone. Get this one wrong and your moral compass can guide you in nothing else.
Tag: politics
Tony Woodlief, with words I need to take heed of:
Cast aside what you think you know is right, the church marquee urges, and consider the God-breathed Word. Give yourself over to it and these seemingly large things–tax rates, economic growth, wars, and rumors of wars–will diminish. Meanwhile, those seemingly small things–the anger in our hearts when we, say, confront someone whose ideology we dislike or the fact that we find it so much easier to spend time with those we like rather than those who need us–will become grievous to our spirits.
This is the Word that cuts through every heart, through the very heart of darkness, illuminating the world as it is and will be. Beside it every politician ever born is remarkably inconsequential. Our business on Election Day is brief, and regardless of who wins our work remains the same–seeking and serving the lost, losing our own lives in the doing, and clinging to the Cross that shatters nations, tribes, and creeds.
Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father:
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.
[…]
In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia.
These are not the words of a politically conservative op-ed columnist. These are not words from a press release from the McCain camp. These are Barack Obama’s own indicting words, revealing his choice in how he was influenced during his college years.
“Everyone experiments in college, Phisch,” I can hear someone say. “Sex, religions, philosophies, politics. It’s all about figuring out who you are, what you believe.”
And what Barack Obama figured out is that he is a hard-line leftist. A socialist. Perhaps even a total Marxist. National Journal has ranked Senator Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate, and it is hardly a right-wing publication. Linda Douglass used to write for National Journal; now she’s Obama’s traveling press secretary.
He chose his friends carefully. William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Jeremiah Wright. Hardly people in touch with mainstream America. With mainstream American politics. These people are not moderates. They are not even slightly left of center. These are people who are either hardcore Marxists, or, in the case of Wright, subscribe to a theology heavily influenced by Marxism.
These are the people Obama chose to be his friends. To be mentored by. To be influenced by. To be helped by.
If you are still undecided in this election, if you still think that Senator Obama is just another moderate Democrat with a message of hope and change, think again. His own words show him to be what he really is. What do you think “spreading the wealth around” really means?
Government doesn’t have “wealth” to spread around. Government only has what funds it gains from its citizens by means of taxation. The bottom 50 percent of taxpayers in this country only pay 3% of the taxes. Three percent.
So when Obama and others talk about “spreading the wealth around”, they are talking about taking money from the 50 percent of us paying the 97% of taxes, and giving it, somehow, to the other 50 percent. That is not democracy. That is not free-market capitalism. That is outright Marxism, and Marxism has not worked anywhere it’s been tried. Why do we believe we can make it work here? Because the right people haven’t been in power to implement it yet?
That’s insanity.
Obama’s acceptance speech at the DNC was touching. It was a brilliant speech.
[…]
Don’t get me wrong, it all sounded wonderful, but I came away from it reminded of the kid who ran for class president when I was in 6th grade based on campaign promises of replacing all of the school’s water fountains with soda fountains. Plenty of kids voted for him because they loved the promise and incorrectly assumed that if he was promising it, he must have a way to make it happen. Those of us who took a minute to think about it realized that it was something that was beyond the power of one person and that it would take one heck of a lot of convincing and a whole lot of spending of money the school didn’t have in order to actually make it happen. Sounded great. Wasn’t realistic.
So, are we voting for what sounds great, or what sounds realistic?
“The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn’t pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known?
“Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be–through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer’s license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business.”
[Emphasis added. —R]
“Who is in the White House is not as important as Who is on the White Throne.” –Stewart Briscoe
[Via Mike.]
Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.
This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
[…]
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
[…]
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
[…]
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
Wow. And I didn’t even quote all of the good parts.
When asked what the market would do, J. Pierpont Morgan is supposed to have replied, “It will fluctuate.” And so it has always done. For the time being, capital will be tighter than before, restricting credit–which is not always a bad thing–and businessmen will be reminded (as legislators, state and federal, seem never to learn) that neither bull markets nor recessions last indefinitely.
This is a fundamental reality of capitalism that seems never to penetrate the minds of journalists or politicians: Markets expand, contract a bit, and expand again, revenue streams are not always smooth, and for economic enterprise, the cost of overconfidence can be the same as the price of inertia: swift self-immolation. What appears to be huge, venerable, and financially indestructible today can be gone tomorrow.
[…]
The financial markets are unsteady at the moment, and Wall Street is undergoing elective surgery. But change, not stasis, is the hallmark of the free market […]
During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.
[…]
Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.
James Madison:
“For the same reason that the members of the State legislatures will be unlikely to attach themselves sufficiently to national objects, the members of the federal legislature will be likely to attach themselves too much to local objects.” (Federalist No. 46, 1 February 1788)