Blank Slate

Here's an oldie-but-goodie evangelical trope that I've decided I'm no longer interested in: the ubiquitous "unspoken prayer request." Or to put it in a more positive way, I honor an unspoken prayer request in the fullest spirit in which it's offered: since it's unspoken, I don't speak it.

I mean really, how is that supposed to work? And what is the purpose of it?

“Dear God, please....something. I don’t really have any of the details, but somebody needs something. Because I have no idea what it is or what I’m asking for or even who its for, I’ll never know if you do it or don’t do it, and you’ll never receive any glory from it. But I’ve done my evangelical duty by telling someone that I’m lifting their unspoken prayer request up. So please...do something...or don’t do something...about whoever or whatever needs something to come or something to go away or something to happen or something to not happen. Amen.”

Under what theology of prayer is that meaningful or effective?

Not The Problem You Think

Rusell Moore at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has an excellent post about the problems with Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Rather than Wright's inane political statements (which have garnered the lion's share of the attention), Moore focuses on the bigger problem: Wright's liberation theology.

As Moore describes,

Liberation theology is seeker sensitive. The first waves of this movement, in Latin America, were designed to make Christianity appealing to the people by addressing their felt needs, the desire for armed revolution and Marxist economics. Liberation theology only works if one can connect with real or perceived oppression and then make the Scripture illustrative of how to navigate out of that situation. The Kingdom of God is a means to a social, economic, or political end.

It's a real problem, and it's overtaking more churches than just Obama's.

Just take a look at the best-selling authors in evangelical Christian bookstores. Listen for a minute or two at the parade of preachers on Christian television and radio. What are they promising? Your best life now. What are they preaching about? How to be authentic. How to make good career choices. How Hillary Clinton fits in Bible prophecy.

How many times have we all heard from pulpits the Bible used in exactly the way that Jeremiah Wright uses it, except perhaps in reverse? Jeremiah Wright uses the Scripture as a background to get to what he thinks is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation from American oppression. Others use the Scripture as a background to get to what they think is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation through the American Dream. Either way, Jesus is a footnote to get to what the preacher deems really important, be it national health care or support for Israel. Either way, apart from the Gospel, the end result is hell for the hearer, regardless of whether God damns or blesses America.

Jeremiah Wright's liberation theology strikes us because it sounds so offensive to our American ears. But the idolotry from many evangelical pulpits ought to sound just as offensive to our Christian ears.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

Russell Moore Jeremiah Wright

Hitting The Links

• Adam Goldberg at MSNBC.com asks the same question I asked two years ago: whatever happened to John Hughes?
  (Hat tip: Bud)

• Here's an affecting, engrossing story about a son's autism in Salon. Though I don't really resonate with the semi-theological angle to the story (and it's written from a decidedly secular perspective), I found it unusually well-written and touching. Strangely, Mark Dever, of all people, even makes a surprise appearance. (Warning: the story does contain one strong vulgarity.)

• If you want to have some fun, read a few articles by the Jewish agnostic mathematician David Berlinski. He's one of the critics of Darwinian theory featured in the Ben Stein movie "Expelled," and he's just delightful to read. In this interview with himself, Berlinski discusses Richard Dawkins' statements of wonder at the materialistic universe:

  Why should Dawkins, of all people, find the universe wonderful if he also believes it is largely a self-sustaining material object, something bigger than a head of cabbage but not appreciably different in kind? The whole place supposedly has no meaning, no point, no purpose, and no reason for its existence beyond itself. Sounds horrible to me. Wonder is the last reaction I’d expect. It’s like being thrilled by Newark, New Jersey. A universe that is nothing more than a collection of atoms whizzing around in the void is a material slum.

• This is weeks old by now (hey, cut me a break--I was on hiatus) and many of you have already seen it, but if you haven't, I highly recommend the recent interview with N.T. Wright in TIME magazine on Heaven. Wright explains his view (with which I agree) that the typical Christian view of the afterlife is a "distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope."

• Watch as an improv troupe stages a spontaneous musical at a mall food court. From the same people who brought you the freaky sudden mass freezing at Grand Central Terminal. (HT: Challies)

• Yikes, who's that guy?

• Don't miss the growing comments section from my Jeremiah Wright post, where our resident atheist Sam once again has his lunch eaten by a swarm of people who recognize the folly of him declaring certain actions "right" and "wrong" under his own naturalistic, evolutionary presuppositions. When all you have are atoms bouncing together, there's no "ought"--only "is." But Sam and many of his fellow atheists can't seem to resist pronouncing grand "oughts" anyway. The discussion is instructive to read, to say the least.

Mark Dever Salon John Hughes David Berlinski Richard Dawkins N.T. Wright Heaven

Left or Lefter

The New York Times has jumped in to remind deludedly optimistic conservatives about John McCain's party-hopping flirtations in recent years:

What Mr. McCain almost never mentions are two extraordinary moments in his political past that are at odds with the candidate of the present: His discussions in 2001 with Democrats about leaving the Republican Party, and his conversations in 2004 with Senator John Kerry about becoming Mr. Kerry’s running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.

There are wildly divergent versions of both episodes, depending on whether Democrats or Mr. McCain and his advisers are telling the story. The Democrats, including Mr. Kerry, say that not only did Mr. McCain express interest but that it was his camp that initially reached out to them. Mr. McCain and his aides counter that in both cases the Democrats were the suitors and Mr. McCain the unwilling bride.

Yeah, yeah, it's the Times, but the story is fully sourced and on-the-record. At the very least, it's a disturbing portrait of a guy who seems to elevate personal grudges above principle. Hey, I think I saw that presidency...back when it was called "Richard Nixon." How'd that go, anyway?

John McCain

And He Always Had Some Mighty Fine Wine

Though he's obviously a tremendous kook, I've found myself a bit uneasy about much of the reaction to the Jeremiah Wright controversy that's been reverberating for several news cycles now. Doug Wilson is putting a finger on the problem in a couple of very insightful posts.

Writes Wilson:

...the most damaging clip was the one in which Jeremiah Wright was railing against the United States, saying, "God damn America for . . . God damn America for . . ." followed by a litany of of die-hard leftist complaints. But what is the real problem here? I recall Billy Graham's wife once saying, "If God doesn't judge America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah." The real reason for the indignation directed at Wright was because he simply said God damn America, not for the screwed-up reasons he had for saying it. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson got a similar reaction when they said something similar after 911. Suppose Wright had said, "God damn America for the abortion carnage. God damn America for sodomite marriages." Now what? Wright is being condemned, not for having the list of sins wrong (which he did), but for being un-American with a camera running.

In another post he writes:

During the Clinton years, it was de rigeur for conservatives to assume that the government was actively involved in cold-blooded murder -- Vince Foster, Ron Brown, not to mention a large percentage of the people connected to Bill's Arkansas drug-running ring. But if someone on the left makes a charge like this, the central problem for the Fox indignants is not the craziness of the charge itself -- pretend the Rev. Wright had said that the CIA had embedded microwave transmissions in iPods that targetted blacks specifically. That kind of thing is what seems to me to be the real problem -- not charges per se, but nutjob charges. But the reaction to this is "how dare he believe our duly-elected government is capable of this?" But our duly-elected government has the blood of forty million infants on its hands, and counting. Why are we talking about "capability"?

I think Wilson's got it exactly right. The problem with Wright shouldn't be that he thinks something is wrong with America. It's that he's so bass ackwards on what is wrong with America.

Jeremiah Wright Doug Wilson

"Expelled"

Last week at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville, I (along with hundreds of others) was treated to a screening of the new Ben Stein documentary film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." The Darwinists are already soiling themselves over it, meaning that we should be in for some fireworks when the movie is released April 18th.

I can't recommend the film highly enough. It's well-made, entertaining, funny, profound, and fearless. And it shows the current, dominant Darwinian establishment for what it is: ruthless ideology disguised as science. "Expelled" profiles several accomplished scientists who are being (or already have been) drummed out of their institutions for daring to question the fundamentalist Darwinian view that only accidental mutations over time (filtered through the "mechanism" of natural selection) are ultimately responsible for the complexity of biological life that we observe today. This view, while grounded on a philosophical (and unprovable and self-contradictory) assumption that only what is physical is real, is imperialistically advanced by its proponents to the point that any dissent whatsoever is cause for punishment. "Expelled" marvelously exposes some of the leading "lights" in this movement, in many cases allowing them to hang themselves on their own words. This film pulls the mask off of "dispassionate science" and exposes the leaders of the Darwinian establishment for the close-minded fundamentalists they really are

One great example: In the most telling moment in the film, uber-atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (who elsewhere has said that "the products of Darwinian natural selection look so stunningly as though they have been designed for a purpose") stunnigly admits in an interview with Stein that it is possible that the first cell (which would have been amazingly complex) could have been designed--but if it was, it was designed by people from outer space who themselves evolved completely naturally somewhere else. In other words, there might be a designer somewhere for the biology we see in our world (since they sure do seem to be designed), but under no circumstances could that designer possibly be God. And this is what passes for cold, hard, rational, almighty "science" these days.

Amusingly, the only tack the Darwinists seem to be able to take in attacking the movie (since it uses their own on-camera statements to hang them) is to call it a "creationist" film, as if simply the product of fundamentalist Christians. It's a nice try, but hosted by Ben Stein, and featuring experts critical of Darwinism like the self-described secular Jew David Berlinski, the charge won't hold much water. The fact is, after decades of Darwinian hegemony over the educational establishment, the vast majority of the American public still doubts the establishment's account. Though the Darwinists would like to make it seem as if the reason for this is that we're simply a country full of addle-pated animists, the fact is that they've never overcome the major holes in their theory, and the public knows that mere assertion doesn't equal proof.

"Expelled" opens April 18th. See it early and see it often, as the old saying sort of goes.

Expelled Ben Stein David Berlinski Richard Dawkins

On The Air

If you're a glutton for punishment, you can listen live to a radio show I'll be hosting in South Florida a little later today. It runs from 12:30pm-2pm Eastern time, and my guests will be New Testament scholar D.A. Carson, Michael Farris of the Home School Legal Defense Association, and a guy who runs several crisis pregancy centers that Eliot Spitzer tried to shut down as the attorney general of New York.

Just go here and click on the streaming audio on the upper right hand side of the page.

Anyone? Anyone?

I attended the National Religious Broadcaster's convention this week in Nashville. On Tuesday, the president of the United States came to speak to us.

But for my money, this was even cooler:



Incidentally, I'll have more later on Ben Stein's new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. But for the moment, let me just say that it is must-viewing.

Even Longer Than The War

Today, I notice, marks my five-year blogoversary. I believe it was the comedian Norm Crosby who once noted, "We gather here together to celebrate this suspicious occasion..."

If you take out the baseball posts and factor in the last two years, I'm actually averaging about nine annual substantive posts. I was blogging before blogging was cool. And now I'm still here blogging long after blogging stopped being cool.

Wow. Five years of trying to find different and unique ways of calling people stupid. We couldn't be prouder.

The Real McCain

Well, the Republican Party completed its suicide last night, finally pushing John McCain forward for the nomination. Mark my words: it will be the biggest landslide loss since Dukakis.

It will be sad to watch people in the coming days throw away their integrity and credibility by pretending that McCain is a good, conservative candidate. I won't be playing that game, and while I might ultimately hold my nose and vote for him, I'll never like him. Cries of "but at least he's not Hillary" are still ringing in my ears. Really? He's not? Whoop de doo.

Since there will be a lot of nonsense coming from the Republican Party establishment in the coming months about what a great Reagan conservative McCain is, I offer the following list for your future reference. You can print it up and carry it around in your wallet to counter all the lies Republican cheerleaders will be selling come summer. Despite the coming propaganda onslaught, when I look at McCain, I still see:

• The unconstitutional McCain-Feingold law, which prohibits free speech in times closest to an election when it’s most important

• That he flirted with switching parties in ‘01 (and in fact, his ’00 campaign political director did switch parties in ’02)

• That the Kerry campaign seriously flirted with offering him their VP slot in ‘04

• That he was one of the “Gang of 14” in the Senate that shut down the Republican effort to end filibustering on judicial nominees (the so-called “nuclear option”) and instead reached a compromise with Dems that led to a number of Bush’s qualified judicial nominees being forever cast aside

• That he voted against allowing a full Senate vote on the Federal Marriage Amendment

• That he has said that, while against abortion, he does not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade

• That he supports embryonic stem cell research and fetal tissue research

• That he has been called by the gay magazine The Advocate “notoriously pro-gay”

• That he was endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans in ‘00

• That he chaired the silly global warming Senate hearings in ’04 and supports global warming legislation

• That he supported amnesty for illegals

• That he was reported by more than one source to have said that he might not nominate the likes of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court because Alito “wore his conservatism on his sleeve.”

• That he was one of only two Republican senators (the other was Lincoln Chaffee) to vote against President Bush’s tax cut in ‘01

• That he was only one of three Republican senators to again vote against tax cuts in ’03.

Even on his supposedly biggest asset with social conservatives--his "pro-life" record--he's been highly overrated. In addition to the aforementioned support for fetal tissue and embryonic stem cell research and his opposition to overturning Roe v. Wade, he's given off signs that his ostensible opposition to abortion is less than ironclad. This very telling comment comes from a 2004 article in the liberal online Slate magazine, in an article written to assure liberals that John McCain is really one of them:

Democrats alarmed by crossover affection for McCain usually begin by complaining about his down-the-line anti-abortion voting record. But McCain's smoke signals spell out something different—an unsuccessful attempt to back away from a mandatory position he no longer believes in, if he ever really did. In August 1999, McCain said, "I'd love to see a point where Roe v. Wade is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." This wasn't a fluke comment—McCain said the same thing more than once. But his trial balloon was quickly shot down by the theo-cons, prompting him to abandon the experiment. The same thing happened again following McCain's suggestion that the nutty Republican platform plank on the topic be rewritten, and again after he made the comment that if his daughter—who was 15 at the time—became pregnant, it would be up to her to decide whether to have an abortion. Despite his professions of fidelity, the pro-life lobby knows better than to trust him. Pro-choicers should similarly recognize that McCain is a hostage, not a hostage-taker, on this issue.

He's an utter disaster, and he's going to lose 40 states. Someday Republicans will again wake up and realize that conservatism wins. In the meantime, they should be preparing to get beaten this year like a trailer wife on COPS.

John McCain conservatism 2008 election Republicans

Postponed

Sadly, Rickles came down ill last night, so the show was postponed. Hopefully they'll reschedule it soon (though they'd better do it quickly--the guy's 82). In the meantime, I consoled myself by watching things on YouTube like the following. As always, there is something there to offend everybody. I also think Ed McMahon was going through a divorce at the time:

Mr. Warmth

As a gift for our wedding anniversary, my wife is taking me to see Don Rickles tonight at the Hard Rock. Whatta gal! My wife feels the same way about Don Rickles that most wives feel about Don Rickles, making this a supremely altruistic and loving gesture on her part.

Which reminds me of my favorite Don Rickles story which he told many times on talk shows about his friend Frank Sinatra. I'm approximating it from memory, but this is pretty close to the way he tells it:

I’m with a date in Las Vegas in the early 60’s. I’m out with this girl, and we’ve brought her parents with us to a fancy restaurant. I see Frank Sinatra on the other side of the restaurant. Everyone’s buzzing with excitement. I get up to go to the bathroom and sneak over to where Frank’s sitting. I say to him, "Hey, Frank, I’m on a date with this girl I really like and her parents are with us too. I hate to ask you this, but it would really be great, and it would really impress them, if you’d just come over and say hello for a minute."

He says, "Of course, Don, anything."

"Gosh, I sure appreciate it, Frank. You're the best," I tell him.

I go back and sit down and we’re eating and I’m telling her parents a story, and a here comes Frank over to say hello. He walks up to the table and says, "Hey, Don, how ya doin'?"

I stop in the middle of my story, turn to him, and say, "Geez, Frank, not now! Can’t you see I’m with people?"

Don Rickles Frank Sinatra

Oh My

We've lost William F. Buckley, (arguably) the most important conservative of the 20th century. In the coming days, many will try to summarize the effect he's had, but it will be almost impossible to do. I do not think it is far-fetched to say that without Buckley, there's no Reagan. In fact, without Buckley, there's probably no modern conservative movement.

This is most unexpected and saddening, indeed. He's been writing right up until the present.

Nor The Son Of One

At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, here's something I wrote the morning after the 2006 elections, about a year and a half ago:

My suspicion is that Republicans are going to try to move to the Left as a result of this election (pointing to the defeats of swing-staters Jim Talent and Rick Santorum as justification), culminating in the nomination of John McCain for president in 2008. If they do, it will officially mark the end of the Republicans' 21st century dominance, as conservative and evangelical voters will have even more reason to sit it out.

If they're smart, however (and I frankly see no evidence of that), they'll see this as a well-timed wakeup call to begin becoming conservative again to reinvigorate their underwhelmed base. Fortunately for them, this was not a presidential election year. They still have time to right the ship (and it does need to be turned Right) in time to avert an era of disaster.

We'll see what they decide to do. I'm not optimistic.

Sadly, I was quite correct. John McCain is going to be the nominee. Between now and the election, many "conservatives" who have great unease about McCain are going to convince themselves that he'd really be pretty good after all, and more and more will "get in line" with the Party. But understand this: McCain is going to lose this election in a 40 state landslide. I'm not kidding. Think about it--which states do you see McCain carrying in November against, say, Barack Obama? I'll give you Arizona. Find me nine more (let alone 20 or 30 more). And that's not even including the specter we'll be treated to in the general election, with John McCain and Barack Obama directly competing with one another on the campaign trail. Obama next to McCain is like a supernova next to a dingy ten-watt light bulb swinging from a cord in a warehouse basement.

Someday someone is going to wake up and realize that in years when the Republicans run as conservatives ('80, '84, '88, '00, '04) they win. And in years when they run as moderates ('76, '92, '96), they get slaughtered. The Republicans are absolutely going to get their clocks cleaned come November. And frankly, it's probably the best thing that could happen to them.

John McCain Barack Obama conservatism 2008 election

Can I Take Your Order?

I don't exactly know why, but every time I watch this, I find myself laughing uncontrollably:

Rip Van Winkle

Well. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I hope you had a nice Valentine's day. It looks like I needed a little bit of a blog break. I hadn't entirely planned to take one, but it just turned out that way. Did I miss anything while I was gone? Anything new happen in the presidential race since last October? Did the Patriots finish off that undefeated season I was expecting? Have they named any names yet in baseball's steroids investigation? How's that Heath Ledger "Batman" movie coming along?

I'm hoping to get back to more semi-regular posting. We'll see how it goes. Bouncing around on the web today (and recently), I see:

• Finally, there's a much-needed takedown of that obnoxious little twit Franky Schaeffer. So your dad didn't play catch with you enough when you were growing up. Suck it up, Skippy.

• It looks like we may have to put the global warming hysteria into hiatus at least until we get past the ice age that seems to be blowing through.

• Christiane Amanpour of CNN gets a tour of a North Korean nuclear facility. She writes:

  For a nation President Bush labeled as part of the "axis of evil," it was not an impressive sight: a dilapidated concrete hulk, built with few resources back in the early '80s
  
  ....Parts of the plant are now dismantled, wrapped in plastic and put into storage
  
  ....It seems a far cry from the hostility conjured by the axis of evil.

  Right. What an idiot that Bush was when he called them that. Why, their stuff is practically falling apart. Of course, buried in the ninth paragraph is this little note, about this harmless little country Bush was so irrationally ramped up about:

  And we even were shown the reprocessing plant where plutonium was extracted from the rods, plutonium that was used for nuclear weapons, the chief engineer admitted.

  I wonder if it's possible that the reactor is in disrepair because President Bush's campaign against North Korea's nuclear program actually worked?

• Doug Wilson wrote something a few weeks ago which ought to light a few fires. I don't always agree with him, but when he's good, he's really good:

  Whenever the radical agenda or the slow encroachment of the state are advanced by the liberals, a large number of conservatives oppose them, sometimes effectively. When we elect the kind of "conservatives" who are just methodical, plodding liberals, this has the effect to consolidating and sealing the previous advances of the radical agenda. A good example of this is the issue of women in combat, something that Scripture calls an abomination (Dt. 22:5). This used to be controversial just ten years ago, and it was the Bush administration that settled the issue, putting it beyond our reach.
  
  ....The fact that I will not vote for McCain or Romney has to do with my judgment (which could certainly be in error) that the effect of their election will be to consolidate and institutionalize some of the central problems in our culture, and that this will happen to even a greater degree than if we get a liberal president. In short, I would rather have a real enemy than a false savior.

Before flipping out, I think it would do us well to consider what he's saying in light of the trajectory of things over the last 40 years or so.

Frank Schaeffer global warming Christiane Amanpour North Korea Doug Wilson

Say What?

Here's my favorite headline of the day, from the AP (via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

Report: Abstinence not curbing teen sex

Ummmm...actually, it is. Wherever abstinence occurs, there is zero teen sex. By definition. You can look it up.

They're Really Dropping Now

I haven't had any free time to post in ages, but I couldn't let one addition--er, subtraction--go unnoticed on my "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list. Everyone who is still alive on this list, please take one step forward.

Not so fast, Mr. Bishop..

• Joey Bishop

• Doris Day

• Harry Morgan

• James Arness

• Conrad Bain

• Jack LaLanne

• John Forsythe

• Rose Marie

• Al Molinaro

• Barbara Billingsley

• Karl Malden

• Larry Storch

I also heard that Deborah Kerr died the other day. She was not on my list. I honestly didn't know she was still alive. She would've been perfect!

Another One Bites The Dust

A new change to the "I Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list. Everyone who is still alive on this list, please take one step forward.

Not so fast, Ms. Wyman.

• Joey Bishop

• Doris Day

• Harry Morgan

• James Arness

• Conrad Bain

• Jack LaLanne

• John Forsythe

• Rose Marie

• Al Molinaro

• Barbara Billingsley

• Karl Malden

• Jane Wyman

• Larry Storch

Houston, We Have A Problem

From a question & answer column in TIME Magazine with Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin:

Given what happened with Lisa Nowak, should astronauts be held to a higher standard? —Chad Miller, COLOGNE, GERMANY

Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities. I think Nowak should be admired for traveling across the country at night and not getting out of her car to put in gas or go to the restroom. It is not excusable, but it is understandable for an achiever to fall into a trap.

Of course, I'm not going to disagree with him. Buzz doesn't like disagreement:



Related tags: Buzz Aldrin Lisa Nowak TIME Magazine

Well Done, Good And Faithful Servant

D. James Kennedy died yesterday at the age of 76. I had the privilege of working for Dr. Kennedy for the past six years.

A lot has been written in the last two days (and particularly good are the remembrances by Al Mohler, Sam Lamerson, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), and much more will be written. I just wanted to share two stories which give a glimpse from my own limited viewpoint of the impact of Dr. Kennedy's life and passion. The first story shows the sheer scale of his impact, and the second shows the individual side.

Two years ago I visited Tanzania, Africa for the first time. The village we were working in was called Kyela. To get there, one must fly into Dar Es Salaam on the East Coast of and then drive 10 hours on a two-lane road into the interior of the country, near the border of Malawi. It's quite rugged there, with many people living in bamboo homes with dirt floors.

A friend and I stayed in the tin-roofed home of a local Baptist pastor. His home was among the nicer I'd seen. It had no running water, but it had been wired with electricity about a year before which powered a dim, fluorescent light bulb hanging above us in his small, concrete floor living room. My friend had known this pastor for some years, but it was my first time meeting him. He was asking what I did for a living in the United States, and I was trying to explain it to him, but I don't think it was quite getting through.

My friend, trying to help, interjected, "John works for D. James Kennedy, who is on television in the United States and is a very highly regarded pastor there." He explained a little bit about Dr. Kennedy's work, and about how preachers sometimes get shown on television in the U.S. The African pastor suddenly got a glint in his eye.

"Oh, I know Dr. Kennedy," he said, matter-of-factly. My friend and I looked at each other in astonishment. How could he possibly know Dr. Kennedy out here in the middle of nowhere, a place it had taken us three full days to reach from Ft. Lauderdale? The pastor got up and went in to his room. When he came back, he showed us a small object in his hand. It was an Evangelism Explosion pin. Not only had he taken EE; he'd been a trainer.

And the second anecdote, showing the individual side. Though he headed a worldwide media ministry, Dr. Kennedy cared about individual people. Often when people heard I worked for him, they'd ask me what he was like "in real life." This is the story I usually tell them:

A couple of years ago, we were shooting on location up in Yorktown and Williamsburg, Virginia for a Christian history special. In television, it sometimes takes hours to set up all the equipment before anything can be shot. During the technical setup, which was at the historic Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Dr. Kennedy remained at the hotel in preparation for what was sure to be a gruelling, all-day project.

When everything was finally ready, I was designated to go pick Dr. Kennedy up back at the hotel. I drove back and went up to his room and got him. Because of his bad back, it was often difficult for him to walk long distances, and it was already quite a hike from his hotel room down to the lobby—it was one of those hotels with long corridors. When we got down to the lobby, I told him I’d pull the car right up to the front door so he wouldn’t have to traipse across the parking lot. I ran out and pulled the car up to the door and waited. And waited. And waited some more. After a few minutes (we were in danger of running late for the shoot now), I went inside to check on him. He was standing at the concierge desk talking to the young woman sitting behind it. Mildly exasperated, I approached them, and as I was about to gently and respectfully suggest that we were late and needed to get going, I realized what he was doing. He was sharing the gospel with her.

I sneaked over to a lobby chair where I was out of the way and waited for them. I saw him then praying with her. She prayed to receive Christ. Obviously, you can’t know for sure what’s going on in somebody’s heart, but she was willing to bow her head and pray right there at her work station in the lobby, and she seemed exuberant when they were done and I finally went over to pull him away.

This was late in his life and ministry after his many accomplishments were already long-secured and mostly in the past. There wasn’t anybody else there watching him. I was the only staff member, and I had gone to get the car. He didn’t do it because he felt like it was expected of him or that he had to be seen doing it. It really was just who the man was. He had a crew of 25 people waiting for him on location, but he was willing to stop to talk to that one girl to tell her about the gift of eternal life.

That was D. James Kennedy.

After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. "Master," he said, "you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more."

His master replied, "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!" (Matthew 25:19-21, NIV)

Related tags: D. James Kennedy Evangelism Explosion

The Value Of An Autograph

Yesterday morning on XM Satellite Radio's "Home Plate" baseball channel, host Mark Patrick read this column on the air, and I was moved by it.

A routine autograph request to a minor league ballplayer turned out to be something more.

"Hello," said the mother. We said nothing in return and continued to act as if we couldn't see or hear her. She stumbled at our coldness, and cast hear eyes around sadly. She looked at her son, who never took his eyes off us, smiled, and then mustered enough courage to try again.

I can't explain to you what its like to avoid someone on purpose. When I write about the concept it just seems too rude and heartless. Maybe it is, but I still do it all the time. In my line of work, sometimes you have to ignore people. You have to tune out the noise of the game.

The column comes from the "Non-Prospect Diaries," written by 26-year-old career minor league pitcher Dirk Hayhurst in Baseball America. The guy may not have a major league future, but has a gift for perceptive writing that most would only dream of.

Related tags: Dirk Hayhurst Baseball America Non-Prospect Diary Mark Patrick XM

Around The Horn

• One of Newsweek's own columnists, Robert Samuelson, publicly de-pantses them over their tendentious and insipid global warming cover story:

  We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. A recent Newsweek cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It's an object lesson of how viewing the world as "good guys vs. bad guys" can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story.
  
  ...Against these real-world pressures, Newsweek's "denial machine" is a peripheral and highly contrived story. Newsweek implied, for example, that Exxon Mobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and Newsweek shouldn't have lent it respectability.

• Charles Krauthammer writes today of the amazing story of St. Louis Cardinals player Rick Ankiel. Ankiel, whose extremely promising pitching career went up in flames in the playoffs at the end of his first major league season in 2000, was just called up to the big league squad again last week--as an outfielder. He hit a 3-run homer in his first game back, and St. Louis (and all of Major League Baseball) is going nuts over him.

• Sitcom writer Ken Levine(M*A*S*H, Cheers, The Simpsons) and former Mariner's announcer, who writes one of the most entertaining blogs in the 'sphere (though be warned--his language gets quite salty), shares some other memories of the late Phil Rizzuto. My favorite:

  The Yankees were playing at Tiger Stadium one night. It was easy to hit home runs down the left field line. It was just a 340 foot chip shot. On the left field wall was a digital clock. A Yankee hit a home run and Rizzuto almost came out of his seat, saying on the air, “Holy cow, what a poke! He [hit] that over the 808 sign!”

• A couple of theological notes. Every pastor ought to:
  
  A). Read this article by Doug Wilson about church conflicts. It's several months old, but profoundly helpful.
  
  B). Listen to the audio, or at least read Justin Taylor's notes, of Tim Keller's talk on Gospel Centered Ministry presented at the Gospel Coalition conference. I'm not kidding--every pastor in America needs to hear and internalize this.

Related tags: global warming environment Newsweek Robert Samuelson Rick Ankiel Charles Krauthammer Ken Levine Phil Rizzuto Doug Wilson Tim Keller

Stop Right There

I was saddened to hear yesterday of the death of Phil Rizzuto. I am among those who believe he was a shaky Hall of Fame selection; indeed, he was only elected by the veterans committee in his 33rd year of Hall eligibility, and even then only when a sufficient number of former teammates were put on that committee. But as a broadcasting aficionado, I grew to love him just like most other baseball fans, even though I generally detest the Yankees.

Two of my favorite things about Rizzuto:

1). I used to love seeing the Yankee games on cable late in his broadcasting career when they'd show a shot of the GW bridge around the 7th inning and wonder aloud where the just-departed-to-beat-the-traffic Scooter might now be on his commute home.

2). If you grew up in the 70's, you likely heard Rizzuto's play-by-play even if you didn't care a thing about baseball. He's the announcer in Meat Loaf's song "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." "Here's the play at the plate! Holy cow, I think he's gonna make it!"

It often seemed like Rizzuto was watching a different game than the one taking place on the field. He got the call wrong almost as often as he got it right, and frequently seemed confused even before it could be blamed on age. Usually I hate that kind of thing. (Listening to a Cubs broadcast with Ron Santo on satellite radio recently, for instance, made me want to vomit. He has no business being in a broadcast booth.) But with Rizzuto, it was fun and endearing.

Perhaps its a tribute to him that I didn't even realize he'd retired from broadcasting more than a decade ago. When I heard yesterday that he had died, I hoped he hadn't died in some hotel room on the road like Richie Ashburn did. The Scooter was a fixture; you just figured he'd always been there and always would be.

The Untouchables

Last week, Newsweek magazine soiled the bed over the so-called global warming "denial machine," demonizing as money-tainted obscurantists any scientists who dare question the fashionable orthodoxy among climate change alarmists. As Warren Meyer notes in a delightful "letter to the editor":

There are so many interesting scientific issues involved in climate change that it was flabbergasting to me that Newsweek would waste time on an extended ad hominem attack against one side in a scientific debate. I was particularly amazed that Newsweek would accuse the side of the debate that is outspent 1000:1 with being tainted by money. This is roughly equivalent to arguing that Mike Gravel's spending is corrupting the 2008 presidential election.

Yet now comes the amazing news that the NASA temperature database from which most of the alarmism community has been drawing was corrupted by--get this--the Y2K bug, and NASA has quietly had to revise their temperature estimates downward.

As noted at Meyer's Coyote Blog:

Today, the GISS [NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies] admitted that [the person who had noticed a likely program glitch] was correct, and has started to republish its data with the bug fixed. And the numbers are changing a lot. Before today, GISS would have said 1998 was the hottest year on record (Mann, remember, said with up to 99% certainty it was the hottest year in 1000 years) and that 2006 was the second hottest. Well, no more. Here are the new rankings for the 10 hottest years in the US, starting with #1:

1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939

Three of the top 10 are in the last decade. Four of the top ten are in the 1930's, before either the IPCC or the GISS really think man had any discernible impact on temperatures.

He also asks a pertinent question, which shows how pernicious and ultimately anti-scientific the strong-arm attempts to silence opposition like the one at Newsweek last week really are:

So how is this possible? How can the global warming numbers used in critical policy decisions and scientific models be so wrong with so basic of an error? And how can this error have gone undetected for the better part of a decade? The answer to the latter question is because the global warming and climate community resist scrutiny. This weeks Newsweek article and statements by Al Gore are basically aimed at suppressing any scientific criticism or challenge to global warming research. That is why NASA can keep its temperature algorithms secret, with no outside complaint, something that would cause howls of protest in any other area of scientific inquiry.

"Denial machine" indeed. Science is about testing conflicting theories against the available evidence. When anyone attempts to shut down such inquiry by fiat, we should ask ourselves what they have to hide.

Oh, and incidentally, the one person most responsible for this corrupted NASA database? James Hansen, the incorruptible and untainted hero of last week's story in Newsweek. As an Investor's Business Daily editorial notes:

Hansen was once profiled on CBS' "60 Minutes" as the "world's leading researcher on global warming." Not mentioned by Newsweek was that Hansen had acted as a consultant to Al Gore's slide-show presentations on global warming, that he had endorsed John Kerry for president, and had received a $250,000 grant from the foundation headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry.

(Hat tip: Coyote Blog, via Hot Air--whose post you also really should read, via Centuri0n)

Related tags: global warming, climate change, Newsweek, James Hansen, NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Y2K bug, environment

If We Shout, Will You Believe Us?

A few months ago, it was TIME magazine that pooped its collective panties over the current global warming frenzy. This week, it's Newsweek that soils itself, evacuating its proverbial bowels of any remaining shreds of credibility.

In this week's piece (and I use that word advisedly) called "The Truth About Denial" (cute, huh?), Newsweek declares outright war on the global warming "denial machine," which evidently looks something like Hillary Clinton's dastardly "right wing conspiracy." You see, Newsweek can't seem to understand why most people persist in not taking their word for it when they insist a climate catastrophe is on the way.

Now, you might think that Newsweek would adopt a posture of humility on climate issues, seeing as though they wet themselves only 30 years ago over the coming global ice age. But you would be wrong. Humility is not really their forte, and so Newsweek finds itself in high dudgeon against those who dare to question the media's current catastrophic pronouncements.

Evidently, Newsweek is stoked because certain industries that would be hurt by draconian regulation under, say, the Kyoto treaties (namely: all of them), are giving funding to organizations doing research disproving the fashionable climate change theories. Newsweek finds this to be an ethical outrage, and professes to be shocked, shocked that selfish interest could play a role in such life-or-death matters. This as opposed to, say, Al Gore, who in no way personally benefits from being positioned as the savior of mankind, or, say, General Electric/NBC (which carried Gore's Live Earth concerts on all of it's networks, and which publishes Newsweek online), who in no way would financially benefit from global warming alarmism. They, and only they, have taken sides for purely objective and altruistic reasons, rather than for the reams of cash suddenly finding its way into their pockets.

Also today, interestingly, comes the news that forecasters are revising their hysterical hurricane estimates for 2007 downward, the main reason being that there haven't been any actual hurricanes yet. According to global warming theory, we should be seeing tons more of them, and so the forecasts were ratcheted up again this year (like last year). But the storms have thus far failed to materialize (like last year), resulting in the revision. Rest assured, however, that the climate alarmists will tell us that the dearth of storms is also because of global warming--just like a surplus of them would've been. And we'll resist the urge to point out that a theory that purports to explain everything explains nothing. Still, one must wonder: if scientists have no idea how many hurricanes there will be this year (or what the weather will be a week from now, for that matter), how accurately will they be able to predict the global temperature 50 years from now? And how accurately were they able to measure the global mean temperature 100 years ago?

To ask such questions is to become a "denier." But I'll bet any one of the alarmists this: 30 years from now we'll all be sitting around laughing at the overheated climate change rhetoric from the 00's, and they'll be on to the next catastrophe. Whaddya want to put on it? Anyone?

Related tags: global warming, climate change, Newsweek, The Truth About Denial, Al Gore, General Electric, NBC, hurricane forecast

That's "Hedley"

For some strange reason, in the last 24 hours I've heard Barry Bonds referred to as "Barry Lamar Bonds" half a dozen times in the media. What gives with the middle name? Never in 20 years of watching him have I heard his middle name until now. Is it an attempt to add gravitas to his steroid-fueled home run record? Or is it a bit of editorializing, casting him with the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wayne Gacy?

I just hope this record doesn't give him the big head. Ooops. Too late.

Barry in 1988



Barry now

My Old School

Last weekend, I did something I didn't think I'd do: attend my 20 year high school class reunion. Now, I happen to have loved high school and had a lot of good friends there, which I know is not a universal experience. I knew there would be some people there with whom I'd spent every day of my life for years, and having lost touch I wanted to see them again. But it's also been a long time, and I've changed quite a bit. I used to be a big partier; now I don't even drink alcohol. I used to be an agnostic, left-wing radical; now I'm a Christian conservative who works in ministry and believes that Jesus is the most important thing in the universe. All of that is hard to explain to drunk people while shouting over loud music.

But finally, about ten days before the event, I realized that I couldn't not go. Too much of my life was spent with some of these folks to merely blow them off. This created a large problem, as I would now only have little over a week to lose 50 pounds, find a better-paying, more prestigious job, earn a graduate degree, and garner multiple community awards.

I let my grateful wife off the hook for this one. There are few things more excruciating in life than attending the other spouse's reunion. The whole event is really designed to completely exclude you from the git-go (unless, as was the case for a few, you met in high school). It's people coming together for the express purpose of sharing memories that do not include you in any way, shape, or form. You can always tell which ones are the spouses, because they're usually gathered together with glum looks around the open bar. Meanwhile, the other spouse isn't having much fun reminiscing with classmates either, because he knows he's in big trouble with the annoyed and excluded wife and has to keep checking back to try to unsuccessfully placate her in some way. And that's not even to mention the relentless and inevitable hunt for the former high school boyfriend or girlfriend. "Is that her?" they hiss as each classmate is greeted, ready to brain somebody with a purse. Having once made a living DJ'ing events like this, and attended a few as a guest, I've seen this scene played out hundreds of times. Not us, not this year, much to my wife's relief.

I was surprised by how well everyone had aged. I suppose those who've been ravaged by Father Time simply choose not to attend (present company excepted). But the ones who were there gave me no easy reasons to have illusions of superiority whatsoever, which was obviously disappointing. Sometimes the experience was surreal. Some of my classmates and I go back as far as grade school together. It's amazing to see the face of someone you knew in first grade suddenly plastered onto a 38-year-old body.

The vast majority of them seem to be doing very well, and undoubtedly all are making more money than I am. Ten years ago that would've been tough; now I can handle it by the grace of God. Still, when a sweet-souled female classmate who is now a cancer specialist M.D. and on the faculty at the Stanford School of Medicine said to me, "You were always so smart," I was tempted to respond, "Oh yeah? You wanna trade houses?"

I'm glad I went back. I'm a much different person then they knew--I've been profoundly changed--but they're unlikely to have noticed that over the thumping music and the raucous celebrating. But being there reminded me how much I care about these people from the Lindbergh High School class of '87 with whom I have a history, and hopefully someday I'll have a quieter opportunity to find out about their adult lives and tell them a little bit about my own journey.

And it also gave me another chance to fly the friendly skies and discover why the airlines are going out of business. This time around, I spent a total of an hour and fifteen minutes waiting for luggage to pop out onto the carousel. I would have been fed up with the wait, but now they make it more interesting by enlisting you into the ranks of their actual baggage handlers. See, now that airports have gone to the innovative slithering-snake shape for their baggage carousels rather than the old, standard oval, you now spend much of your wait dodging luggage that careens off the treadmill at impossibly tight turns, trying to shove somebody's golf clubs back onto the conveyor belt while also nursing your shattered tibia. Way to go, American Airlines! That's worth the price of that 13-inch wide seat right there.

The List Grows Smaller

There have been several notable deaths this week. First, legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman scratched himself off my "Can't Believe They're Still Alive" list. They've been dropping like flies over the last year or so.

More distressingly (to me, at least), former "Tomorrow Show" host Tom Snyder died of leukemia earlier in the week at the age of 71. His death was quite unexpected, at least to me. For my money, Snyder was about as good as television gets; a pure broadcaster. This is a guy who, with nothing more than a cigarette and a black backdrop, could create entertaining, often riveting television night after night just by talking. There are few true broadcasters left anymore, but Snyder was definitely one of them.

For a quick overview of the style that made Snyder great, here's a video compilation of some interview snippets. He was an odd, quirky, one-of-a-kind interviewer, and television has been worse off since he left it. There will never be guys like this on TV again. Watch and enjoy.

MoreOn La Russa

From Will Leitch at Deadspin.com, which I won't link to because of some language violations:

Yes, Tony, we understand, the game could have gone into extra innings, and it's possible the National League would have run out of players. But . . . you've got Albert Pujols with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of a one run game! What do you want, anyway? As tends to be the case with La Russa anymore, he's so busy thinking about how he's three steps ahead of everyone else that he walks smack dab into a pole.

Related Tags: Tony La Russa, Albert Pujols, All-Star game

Another Attack Of Genius

I've had it with Tony La Russa. I just can't take it anymore.

Yes, I wrote some wild-eyed accolades in the heat of the World Series win last season. (Give me a break; my team had just won the World Series.) And no, perhaps I'm not being totally consistent. I think I made a vow sometime after the World Series somewhere that I was finally going to stop hammering him, and I suppose I'm breaking that vow now. But beginning with the DUI arrest in spring training, through the Josh Hancock tragedy (in which La Russa threatened reporters with a fungo bat), up to last night's All-Star game fiasco, this season has been a La Russa-made disaster.

I should've seen the handwriting on the wall with the Scott Rolen feud that simmered during the entire post-season last year (and carried into this season) after La Russa chose to communicate with Rolen through the media rather than in person when benching him. Or perhaps I should've seen it when LaRussa first arrived in St. Louis and got into a dispute with all-time great Ozzie Smith that still lasts to this day, after La Russa told him he'd have to compete with for the starting shortstop job with future non-Hall-of-Famer Royce Clayton--only to give the job to Clayton anyway even after Ozzie thoroughly outplayed him in spring training that year. Or when La Russa invited Andy Van Slyke to spring training for a comeback attempt in 1997, only to cut him after Van Slyke hit .525 that spring. The guy is a bad communicator, and he needlessly jerks people around.

In case you you missed the Major League Baseball All-Star game last night (and at this point, who doesn't miss it?), Tony La Russa, managing the NL team, left his own superstar Albert Pujols on the bench even when they had two outs, bases loaded, the game-tying run on third base, and the game-winning run in scoring position. My son and I, along with the other 200 people who still watch the All-Star game, kept asking each other, "How do you not use Albert Pujols here?" He must be injured, we figured.

Well, it turns out that he wasn't injured, and frankly, like the rest of the baseball fans in America, is a little steamed that La Russa never played him. Keep in mind, this is La Russa's own player--a guy with a lifetime .330 batting average who has never finished below fourth in the MVP voting or failed to be in the top 5 NL players in RBI in his entire career. Turns out that La Russa evidently failed to communicate with his best player that he'd only be playing if the game went into extra-innings. And he followed it up by blasting Pujols in the media for being disappointed at not playing.

So instead of letting future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols bat with the game on the line in the 9th inning, where a solid single would've won the game for the NL, La Russa left it to Aaron Rowand--he of the career high 69 RBI and lifetime average 50 points lower than Albert's. Rowand flew out. Game over. And typically, when questioned, La Russa became defensive and decided to speak to his player through the media after not speaking to him personally the entire game. The guy's communication skills are seriously bankrupt, and his strategy makes no sense whatsoever. What good is it to save Pujols for extra innings when you're down by a run with two outs in the bottom of the 9th? I think Rob Neyer of ESPN.com sums up this idiocy best (which comes via Jeff Gordon in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch):

Brilliant! Save your star until you really, really need him! Just think how many more games the Yankees might have won, if only Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy had realized how foolish it was to actually put Babe Ruth in the starting lineup. And now we know why the Yankees are struggling this season: Joe Torre’s not saving Alex Rodriguez for the extra innings! I mean, the guy can play third base, shortstop, and (I’m quite sure) first base or left field in a pinch.

Enough already. It was a nice run. It's time to move on. Take the "genius" somewhere else already.

Related Tags: Tony La Russa, Albert Pujols, Major League Baseball, All-Star game

Calling Corey Hart

I've been out of town on business and then on vacation, all of which has kept me away from here for the last couple of weeks.

But while I was on vacation, I did get to catch a little bit of those "Live Earth" concerts on TV over the weekend. It was pretty amazing. They had Madonna, the Police, and Duran Duran. With a lineup like that, they're practically guaranteed to lick this global warming by 1987.

Related Tags: Live Earth, The Police, Madonna, Duran Duran

All My Talent Seems So Far Away

I saw the new iTunes commercial the other day where 65-year-old Paul McCartney is prancing around with a mandolin playing a song called "Dance Tonight" from his new album.

Now, it's probably been over 20 years since the last time I heard a new McCartney song actually played on Top 40 radio, and I think there's a reason for that. I'm thinking the last one I heard played was either "No More Lonely Nights" from that horrible musical he wrote, or the theme from the Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd movie "Spies Like Us" (and the cast list alone ought to tell you how long ago that was). In either case, things were obviously slipping even then, so I recognize that we're no longer dealing with a guy at his creative peak, no matter how enormous his past contributions to popular music.

But as I'm watching this song on the commercial, McCartney's jumping around singing, "Everybody gonna dance tonight/Everybody gonna feel alright..."

"Dance tonight/feel alright"? I mean, are you kidding me? That's a lyric a sixth-grader writes when he comes home with his first guitar and tries to write a rock song in his bedroom. This, from one-half of the most sucessful songwriting duo in history?

Somebody's gotta stop this fight. The champ is bleeding badly, and he's embarassing himself out there.

Related Tags: Paul McCartney, Dance Tonight, iTunes

Now You Know

Whether you are a confused fan, or merely caught up in the post-series controversy, thanks to this supressed clip which has since surfaced, you can now rest easy knowing the final resolution to "The Sopranos."



(And yes, it's family- and work-friendly.)

Supreme Conflict

If you're a Supreme Court geek like I am, I'd highly recommend picking up a copy of Jan Crawford Greenberg's recent book Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court.

I've read a good number of books about the Supreme Court, but two things made Greenberg's book stand out:

1). Greenberg, who is a legal correspondent for ABC News and formerly with the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, is scrupulously fair in her reporting and characterizations. I expected to find conservatives and conservative positions treated with the typical disdain, and for the legal issues to be approached from the usual liberal standpoint. What I found instead was a balanced, fair presentation of both sides. As a conservative, I felt that my ideas were presented honestly and respectfully, and yet, after reading the book, I have no idea how Greenberg votes--which is a credit to the work she's done here.

2). She uncovers great inside information, along the lines of earlier works like Woodward's The Brethren and Lazarus' Closed Chambers. She conducted interviews with almost all of the justice and makes extensive use of other sources such as the recently released notes of former Justice Harry Blackmun. It makes for a fascinating picture of the inside of the Rehnquist Court, as well as the Roberts and Alito nominations.

One of the great nuggets revealed in her book (via Blackmun's notes) is the fact that Clarence Thomas, widely caracatured by the know-nothing liberal media as a dolt and a Scalia clone, is actually perhaps the most independent justice. As it turns out, it has been Thomas who has far more often swayed Scalia's opinion than vice-versa. Thomas has been willing to stand as a party of one since his very first week on the Court. But of course, as a result of the "soft bigotry of low expectations," the truth about Thomas doesn't fit well with the condescending storyline the media wants to pin on him.

The book also presents the most comprehensive account I've seen yet about the Harriet Miers fiasco--what the administration flunkies were thinking, and what finally changed their minds. I found the book so engrossing I finished it in about two days. If you're a court-watcher, do yourself a favor and take a copy with you on your summer vacation.

Related Tags: Jan Crawford Greenberg, Supreme Conflict, Clarance Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Miers, Harry Blackmun

Don't Stop Believin'

Hold on to that feelaaaeeeaaaaiiin...

Feeling Our Pain

Even Hugh Hewitt, who tried to convince us that we were being served Dom Perignon when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, has finally woken up and tasted what's actually in the cup:

At this point I take out my Harriet Miers Fan Club charter membership card and put it on the table: This push for this [immigration] bill is a disaster, Mr. President. Much much worse than the Miers nomination on which you had many good arguments, or the ports deal, on which you had fewer. On this issue there is no place to stand, and you are asking your friends in the Senate to go down fighting for a bad bill. It is a bad bill because no one believes the government can conduct millions of background checks (many spokesmen for the bill don't even pretend to know where the paperwork will go!). No one believes the bill will halt the next 12 million. No one believes you are going to assure the fence gets built. No one believes that the employer verification system will get done or work when some half-assed version of it does get done. No one believes that the probationary visas don't automatically convert illegal aliens with few if any rights into Due Process Clause covered legal migrants, with a Ninth Circuit ready and waiting to keep them here for decades.

....This isn't a talk radio fueled shout from the far right. It isn't the Minutemen or the Tancredo people. It is the GOP faithful who don't want it, nor anything like it.

...[T]he deal has to be one worth taking, not the same deal we'd get under a second President Clinton. That's why the political rebellion is here: This looks like a bill that Hillary would have sold as tough on enforcement. We can wait two years for that.

Of course, the outrage at the Miers fiasco and the ports deal weren't "far right" kook attacks either. Now perhaps Hewitt, who helped press the White House's strategy of painting conservative critics as sexists and bigots, will understand what it's like to be on the conservative side of this clueless Republican White House. All this time the administration's been soaking his leg, he actually believed them when they told him it was raining.

Related Tags: Hugh Hewitt, Harriet Miers, George W. Bush, immigration reform

Squandered

It is nothing short of amazing to me that the Bush Administration and its minions have begun demonizing even the conservative opponents of their incomprehensible and foolish immigration plan as racists and bigots. And yet it shouldn't be surprising, since Bush has been employing this suicidal "attack the base" strategy for years now. It is because of such political savvy that he'd now have to make tremendous upward strides to reach Jimmy Carter's approval numbers, or even those of Nixon during Watergate.

As you may recall, this was the same strategy the administration employed when Bush disastrously nominated his personal valet Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Miers was utterly unqualified to sit on the high court (as even many administration insiders now admit they knew, as revealed in Jan Crawford Greenberg's outstanding new book Supreme Conflict). After appointing an inferior candidate merely because she was a personal crony of the president's, the administration then went on the offensive against disappointed conservatives (who recognized Bush had broken his promise to appoint another Scalia or Thomas), intimating that opposition to the nomination was based on sexism and elitism.

They again rolled out the tactic when the administration came up with the bright idea of trying to sell American ports to Arabs. When more than a few people questioned the wisdom of selling American ports to those who support our enemies, the Bush administration waved away criticism by implying that such fears were based in "Islamophobia."

Most true conservatives have long since had enough of this nonsense, and Peggy Noonan today gives voice to several years of built-up frustration in a scathing attack:

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

Noonan also talks about her own personal disillusionment with the president, for whom she actively campaigned and whom she vocally supported until his overreaching, messianic inaugural speech in January 2005:

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

That paragraph is as good a summation of the Bush presidency as one will ever find, a presidency that can now be declared from a conservative standpoint, without reservation, a failure.

It will take the conservative movement years to recover from what George W. Bush has done to it. Considering where we were sitting just three years ago in the wake of the 2004 elections, that's nothing short of tragic.

Related Tags: George W. Bush, Peggy Noonan, Harriet Miers, immigration

Sanity Prevailing

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court handed down an unremarkable ruling in a discrimination case in which a woman claimed she had been systematically underpaid (well below the level of her male counterparts) for a period of years.

The law she filed the suit under, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically states that suits must be filed within 180 days of the alleged violation. The woman who filed the suit was claiming that the discrimination took place years earlier.

The Supreme Court, in a controversial turnabout from the last 40 years, read Title VII and ruled against the woman, insanely interpreting the section of the law that said the suit must be filed within "180 days" to mean that....the suit actually needed to be filed within 180 days. Which it wasn't. In the normal world, this wouldn't seem that complicated, and certainly would be uncontroversial. It's open and shut. The law has an explicit deadline contained in it, and the woman's suit missed that deadline by a matter of years.

But to the liberal justices of the Supreme Court, laws aren't actually laws, and words aren't actually words. Laws are merely suggestions that courts can ignore at will (like, for instance, when the Florida Supreme Court daily rewrote the duly passed election law deadlines in 2000 desperately hoping for some recount that would show Al Gore the winner). Thus, in what ought to be a no-brainer, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a dissent from the majority ruling, which she read from the bench in an unusual show of disagreement. To Ginsburg, the fact that the law specifically and explicitly requires that suits must be filed within 180 days is meaningless and free to be ignored. (In her dissent, without apparent irony, Ginsburg calls the Court's plain reading of "180 days" a "cramped interpretation.")

According to the Washington Post:

Yesterday she said that "Title VII was meant to govern real-world employment practices, and that world is what the court today ignores." She called for Congress to correct what she sees as the court's mistake.

Translation: Ginsburg was unable to change the law by fiat directly from the bench as had previously been her practice, and thus had to resort to the far less savory option of handing the law back to the people (who passed it to begin with) to change it or not change it as they see fit. The outrage of it all!

Of course, Ginsburg's pique notwithstanding, this is the way the system was actually intended to operate. The legislatures write the laws, and the judges apply them as written--without substituting their personal policy preferences for those of the people. The only reason it is working correctly now after a 40-plus year hiatus is because conservative Samuel Alito now sits on the United States Supreme Court, shifting the balance away from the liberal majority Ginsburg, Stevens, Souter, and Breyer were accustomed to ruling over us with.

How revolutionary to have a majority of Supreme Court justices who now read a law and act as if it means what it says.

Related Tags: Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito, Ledbetter v. Goodyear

The Assured Results Of Science

As you know by now, the great goddess Science has pronounced global warming a human-induced tragedy that will destroy the entire planet in perhaps hours. (For more on this, see the mid 70's scientific and journalistic pronouncements on the environment, and substitute the words "global warming" for "coming ice age.")

On Friday night, I accidentally tuned into the Anderson Cooper show on CNN. If you've never seen this program before, the idea is that Anderson is sent out into the field to exotic and newsworthy locales, and then reports on how being there makes him personally feel on an emotional level (e.g. "It's really eerie to be here. I have this feeling--it's hard to describe"). On Friday, he'd been sent to Greenland. (Perhaps he welshed on a bet with a CNN boss or something.) The topic, needless to say, was global warming. Anderson was there because Greenland is made mostly of ice, and some of it appears to be melting. ("It's literally changing the map of this country!")

With Anderson in Greenland was Jeff Corwin, a hyperactive environmentalist TV nature show host who I used to have trouble distinguishing from Steve Irwin, though that problem has abated somewhat in the last year. This, of course, was a program about science, part of CNN's ongoing "Doomed Planet of Death" series (or something along those lines). The purpose of the program is to convince us that science shows we're in real trouble.

So Anderson, in telling us about his feelings, mentions that it's eerie and disorienting to be in Greenland because you can't really see the horizon. Because of the color of the ice and the color of the sky, it all looks like one. At this point, "wildlife biologist" Jeff Corwin, whom CNN had flown all the way to Greenland in an effort to help Anderson Cooper make the scientific point that the earth is doomed, chimed in to add some science. I'm taking this directly from CNN's transcript, since I actually had to double-check it to make sure I heard him correctly:

This is what's really amazing. If you were back home, for example, in New York, and you could see where the skyline is, you could see where the horizon is.

But if you look, there's horizon all the way around you, which is really incredible. You're that close to the top of the world, that you don't get sort of a dividing point. You're completely surrounded by the top of the world.

That's right, kids. According to scientist Jeff Corwin, whom CNN has flown to Greenland to give us the Scientific Perspective on Global Warming, the reason you don't see a horizon in Greenland is because you're nearly at the top of the planet. See, when you stand at the top of this round planet, the horizon disappears...because you're so high up. I just hope he held onto something so that he didn't slide off. Presumably, that would be an awfully long fall from "the top of the planet."

So enough already, you doubting, obscurantist flat-earthers. Stop doubting science of global warming and get behind the geniuses before more of the horizon melts away and we're all hurtled into space.

Serendipity

In an odd confluence, the themes of my previous two separate, unrelated posts suddenly come together in this Slate article today in which the aforementioned Christopher Hitchens savages the aforementioned Jimmy Carter.

It starts mercilessly and builds from there:

Almost always, when former President Jimmy Carter opens his big, smug mouth, he has already made the psychological mistake that is going to reduce his words to absurdity. When he told the press last week that the Bush administration had aroused antipathy around the world, he might have been uttering no more than a banality. But no, he had to try to invest it with a special signature flourish.

Ouch.

It's fun to read because Carter is such an inviting target. Unfortunately, however, Hitchens, because of his rabid antipathy toward Christianity, misplaces the locus of Carter's stupidity, rooting it in Carter's professed faith (which, by the way, bears little resemblance to the faith of traditional Christians) rather than where it belongs--in his reflexive leftism . But of course Hitchens himself has long been a man of the Left, albeit an unpredictable (and increasingly dissatisfied) one. Thus, while he recognizes and chafes Carter's characteristic inanity, he necessarily finds it easier to blame on Carter's supposed religiosity than on their many shared presuppositions.

Related Tags: Christopher Hitchens, Jimmy Carter, Slate

Hitched To The Wrong Horse

These have been widely linked in the blogosphere already, but be sure not to miss the fascinating exchange between the atheist Christopher Hitchens and the Christian Douglas Wilson in the online pages of Christianity Today.

Wilson does a magnificent job of exposing Hitchens' utter inability to justify--on his own principles--his manifest moral outrage. While Hitchens is big on bluster, he's dodged the central question for the entire debate. It's a failing shared by all atheists with whom I've ever had contact. I can't help thinking it's not accidental.

The discussion can be found here: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

Related Tags: Doug Wilson, Christopher Hitchens, atheism, Christianity Today

Opening The Peanut Hole

It takes a lot to bring an uninspired, reclusive blogger--who's been on hiatus for nearly a month--out of his self-imposed exile. But Jimmy Carter's just the guy to do it.

As I've pointed out before, despite the saintly image the media desperately tries to pin on him ("the greatest ex-president ever!"), Carter is a venal, bitter opportunist who desperately wants to obscure his true legacy--the disastrous, spirit-crushing presidency he foisted on America from 1977 to 1981. No living president is more relentlessly vain than Jimmy Carter, who coddled every evil Leftist dictator on the planet in an effort to garner his much-lobbied-for Nobel Peace Prize.

As you undoubtedly heard, Carter decided to air the latest in his long string of criticisms of the Bush administration this weekend, breaking a longstanding post-presidential tradition of relative neutrality as he continues his attempt to prop up his own tarnished legacy by attacking subsequent administrations. He told an Arkansas newspaper that, "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." This, of course, coming from a president who fecklessly stumbled through the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet nuclear buildup, locked us into a disastrous deal with North Korea (as an ex-president, no less), fumbled the economy every which way, and made America a laughing stock in the post-Nixon years.

Today, in the face of stinging (and much-deserved) criticism, Carter tries to weasel out of his remarks, and does so with the craven gutlessness that characterized his entire presidency. He now says about his remarks, "They were maybe careless or misinterpreted."

Beautiful. I don't think a single statement could better sum up Jimmy Carter. "My remarks were possibly a mistake, and they were either a mistake that I made, or a mistake that somebody else made about me. I'm not sure yet. I was either utterly out of line as an incompetent former president, or else maybe all of you just misunderstood me. I don't remember for sure. Let me get back to you."

Related Tags: Jimmy Carter