Squaring the Culture

Every now and then, some Christian pops up on a political blog site and says something about the fear of God. And every time they do, some theological or political liberal pipes up with the same, over-rehearsed quip: “Some of us think God is a pretty nice guy, not scary at all.”

It’s culturally approved to speak of God, if one speaks of Him at all, as a source of non-stop, unconditional love, and that’s fine, as far as it goes. If your picture of God doesn’t include this, I’d say you’ve never met Him. Likewise, it’s culturally deprecated to speak of Him as fearsome, and again, if your picture of God is nothing but this, I’d say you’ve never met Him.

But is that jibe earned, and is it accurate? I say not. If it’s Christian at all, it’s the babbling of a Christian infant.

A person who only knows of God that “He’s a pretty nice guy,” but cannot grasp the feeling of standing naked and unconcealed before The Righteous Judge, with one’s sins fully exposed, has not yet made even the first, small step toward becoming righteous himself. In fact, it’s this sense of having fallen immeasurably short that usually begins the penitent’s journey toward knowing and loving God.

If you’ve never experienced it yourself, you can think of it as how a son feels when confronted in the act of stealing candy by a stern but loving father. You feel His love, but also the shame of having disappointed Him, and the knowledge that you’ve lost something immeasurably valuable that, despite His love and forgiveness, you can never have back. Spanking, if it comes, is cathartic; and if it doesn’t come, you’ll wish it had.

There is a place to which mature believers eventually arrive when they’re in real, deep fellowship with the Father, and know His love without any fear. However, a person who has arrived there would never, even for a millisecond, chide someone who’s genuinely feeling the fear. The fear is part of how you get there.

So the jibe imitates mature believers, but could actually only come from infants who have barely even begun Christian growth. It’s much more likely, in my estimation, that those who say such things are not Christian at all, and are instead merely fools criticizing something of which they know not even the first elemental steps.

Dan Riehl is somewhat gleefully announcing Huckabee’s tidal wave receding.

Mr. Huckabee is learning how it works when you’re the Official Candidate of the Deprecated Minority, the minority in this case being Evangelical Christians. Bigoted slurs against Evangelicals are not just permissible, they’re obligatory.

This is not to excuse Mr. Huckabee, whose performance has been shallow and filled with mistakes. Rather, it’s to point out that if a Deprecated Minority (D.M.) candidate is to win, he’s got to be head and shoulders above his competitors, not just even with them. And heaven defend the D.M. who is sloppier than his foes!

An Evangelical can win a national election; one did, twice (George W. Bush.) But if one is to do it again, he either has to downplay his Evangelicalism, as Bush did, or he’d better be smart, well-financed, and very, very precise. Mike Huckabee is an intelligent, articulate and successful man, but he doesn’t seem up to the standard an Evangelical must hit if he’s going to win an election in the current, anti-Evangelical milieu.

All of the Democrat candidates have made factual flubs at least as egregious as Mr. Huckabee’s, but have been given a pass by the press. Evangelicals just, plain have to be better. This isn’t fair, but it’s fact.

Wonder why the multiculturalists aren’t leaping to their defense? Could their defense of Deprecated Minorities possibly be selective?

News first:

Interior ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema said rioting across the country had destroyed 176 banks, 72 train cars and 18 railway stations, while at least 100 prisoners had been sprung from jails.

Violence shakes the nation of Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. The military is attempting to crack down on rioters who are burning banks, trains, and jails.

Meanwhile, the nation prepares for Parliamentary elections due January 8. So far, no move has been made to postpone the elections, despite the fact that members of the PPP, Bhutto’s opposition party, distrust the government. Nine election offices have been burned in the riots.

Official reports blame al Qaeda for the attack that caused Bhutto’s death, and specifically name Pakistani militant leader Baitullah Mehsud as having ordered the attack. Mehsud also allegedly ordered the bomb blast in Karachi that killed 140 people last October in another attempt on Bhutto’s life. Mehsud allegedly denied involvement, from his center of operations in Waziristan, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The current unrest in Pakistan rides on the charge that the Musharraf government did not provide enough protection for Bhutto. Opponents claim the assailant got close enough to shoot her, while the government’s official report claims that Bhutto hit her head on a protruding sunroof handle when the bomb exploded, and died from head trauma. The government has offered to exhume Bhutto’s body for opposition leaders to examine.

That’s the news. Here are my thoughts:

Pakistan owns viable nuclear weapons. They’re safe for now, but should the nation fall into civil war and the government collapse, it is possible that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of international wahabist terrorists. This concern, alone, could trigger US involvement to support the Pakistani government.

The good news is that Pakistan should now be firmly committed to finding and killing al Qaeda operatives in Waziristan, where Osama bin Laden is alleged to be hiding. If there was any doubt that the terrorists in the mountains were a danger to Pakistan, that should now be erased.

The Bush Doctrine on the middle east holds that stable, free republics don’t attack each other, and counts on a stable Pakistan. The terrorists seem to agree with this view, which is why they feel an unstable Pakistan favors them. And of course, if the Pakistani government is fighting for survival, it will not come after them in their mountain strongholds on the Afghan border.

By keeping terrorism in clear view, the situation is likely to benefit whichever Presidential candidate manages to convince voters that they’re able to manage foreign affairs. Conventional wisdom gives this edge to McCain and Thompson on the Republican side, and Clinton on the Democrat side, although to be frank, Sen. Clinton’s attempt to connect herself to Bhutto appears to be an exaggeration. (The mainstream press is dutifully ignoring this. You’ll find fuller treatment of Ms. Clinton’s “Al Gore moment” at Sweetness and Light.)

My Western-entertainment-addled brain wonders whether the murder could have been a covert government operation designed to remove Musharraf’s chief opposition in the coming election. The latest news implicating al Qaeda all comes from the Musharraf government (the original report came from an Italian newspaper). Al Qaeda leader Mehsud is reported to have denied involvement from his village in Waziristan. However, this possibility appears remote.

I guess Iran isn’t completely savvy about producing convincing web content for the West yet.

An Iranian web site, attempting to dismiss reports that Jews are escaping Iran en masse, published the following picture along with the article:

The only problem was, the image was originally posted as a satire, and was photoshopped for the purpose of lampooning western analysts who think terrorism would cease if we simply abandoned Israel. Here’s the original image, from The Peoples Cube:

The satire is actually very funny, and includes this lovely image of bin Laden along with the caption, “Israel was the only reason why we bombed New York, Paris, London, Bali, Riyadh, Thailand, Kashmir, Russia, Morocco, Nigeria, India, and the Philippines. But now all our operations will cease.”

Do you get the impression that perhaps our friends in Iran do not understand the Western concept of satire?

Credit goes to Gateway Pundit for presenting this fascinating flub, and to The Peoples Cube for spotting it.

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12/29 update: Gateway Pundit located the original photo, which was apparently taken from a nuclear energy protest in 2005. The slogan on the placard is translated “Nuclear energy is our absolute right.”

From the Editors of the National Review:

John McCain’s aides complain that Mitt Romney is running a negative campaign. Those same aides have been attacking Romney themselves, but for the most part they can outsource the negativism to their friends in the press…

We heard complaints like this from McCain back in 2000 in South Carolina, where McCain was the victim of an underhanded “love child” accusation. The fact that the McCain campaign itself was guilty of launching hard-ball low shots does not excuse the slimy tactic, but it makes his complaints about it much less respectable.

In fact, the level of complaining (among other character issues), containing an unmistakable note of entitlement, led me to conclude that John McCain was not a man that I would like leading my country.

My apologies go to those who believe that a man imprisoned during war deserves nothing but respect. I do respect the sacrifice. I also note that Sen. McCain lost 5 airplanes under his command, including the one that landed him in North Vietnam; perhaps he would have been better suited to a different job.

John McCain strikes me as a man who has something to prove; a domineering, demanding Admiral for a father can sometimes produce sons achieve out of emotional need. I sympathize; but men who have something to prove are dangerous when given power. Their position gets tied to their ego. They tend to care more about defending their legacy than about performing their job. Two Presidents in my lifetime have been driven by a need to prove their worthiness: Richard Nixon and William Clinton. It’s no accident that both were more committed to defending their public reputation than to upholding the law.

We need to assess the character of our leaders, not only by military service, but also by their public and private conduct afterward. And while there are more important virtues, I expect our leaders to be able to weather some rough shots without complaining. Whining about unfair treatment does not impress either the Putins or the bin Ladens of the world. In this, I suspect I’m in agreement with most Americans; call me petty, but if you want to lead me, don’t whine.

The LA Times notes that in the last few days of Iowa campaigning, Hillary Clinton has ceased allowing her audiences to ask questions. Even Chelsea is stifling herself. Apparently they’re not risking any last-minute, candid blunders.

Ms. Clinton is famously unable to field hard-ball questions from reporters. Her campaign came close to disintegrating when Tim Russert (God bless him forever as an honest man) pressed a question concerning her stand on drivers licenses for illegal aliens; it was the first time I recall her actually facing a tough question from the press, and it wasn’t even all that tough of a question. She’s been caught several times planting questions for her debates and public appearances. No wonder she refused to debate on Fox; Brit Hume’s forthright honesty would have flattened her against the green wall.

One wonders how she’d fare with the likes of Vladimir Putin or Kim Jung Il. I don’t doubt she’s mean enough, but she doesn’t seem astute enough to manage her positions well under fire. Perhaps it’s because they’re not actually her positions; it’s a lot harder to remember your last 8,000 lies than to speak forthrightly from principle.

(Photo borrowed from the Drudge Report.)

Good news from the Iraq front shows up today on the editorial page of the New York Sun. Apparently the world currency markets see Iraq as a good bet, with the Iraqi dinar outperforming the Russian ruble and the Chinese renminbi for 2007, up a full 10% against the dollar for the year. Trade in Iraq’s national debt has also been going up recently. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit spotted this one.

Stick this in your bag of Iraq-surge factoids. The market can be fooled, but it usually takes more than a public dog-and-pony show to do it. If investment money is headed into Iraq, it means some serious players are expecting continued good news. You can’t take it to the bank today, but maybe after it matures in 5 years…

I can’t find it on the news feeds yet, but Michelle Malkin reports that Benazir Bhutto, twice Prime Minister of Pakistan and recently returned to Pakistani politics after receiving amnesty from current Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf, has been assassinated.

She was killed this morning at a rally of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party at Rawalpindi, near Islamabad in Pakistan, in a combined bombing and shooting attack.

According to Adnkronos International, al Qaeda is claiming credit for the attack. The report claims:

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.

However, this has not been confirmed by any other source yet. I don’t find this entirely credible; Bhutto was not a strong ally of the United States and had limited political power. I can understand al Qaeda’s discomfort with the possibility of a woman leading Pakistan, but she has led twice before without violent reaction from wahabists.

The Bush administration’s Middle East strategy has relied on building prosperous, stable, free republics in the region. Cooperation from Pakistan, which borders Afghanistan on the east and south, has been essential to freeing Afghanistan from the Taliban, and was touted as a major achievement of the Bush administration in 2002.

Supporters of Bhutto are rioting in parts of Pakistan, and it remains to be seen whether representative democracy can survive the chaos in Pakistan. Clearly, this assassination adds to the chaos.

Read about Bhutto on Wikipedia.

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Added a few minutes later: This AP report was posted 30 minutes ago on Yahoo.

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Added at 4:30 PM: Hot Air has a very thorough spread on the assassination, with some links to the previous assassination attempt back in October.

Forgive me if I’m telling you something you already knew, but I’ve just found an amazing tool for researching acts of Congress.

Launched in 2006, http://www.govtrack.us provides a nicely-sorted feed of legislative information from the Thomas system (thomas.loc.gov) and other sources provided by Congress and by individual congressmen. Want to find out something about a bill? Type the title of the bill, the number of the bill, or some descriptive keywords into the seach bar, and you’ll find out when it was submitted, by whom, and where it stands in the legislative process.

This site is run by a grad student in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, named Joshua Tauberer. I think I might just send Josh a check to help fund the site.

Don’t miss his links page, either; it’s under “Learn More,” and it’s got links to some sites that shine the light of day on some very dark corners of Congress.

Jay Lefkowitz, who was deputy director of domestic policy at the White House when the President announced his compromise decision on embryonic stem cell research in August 2001, wrote a lengthy description in Commentary of the evaluation process the President worked through on his way to making a decision. He feels that since the recently-announced development of a means to create embryonic stem cells from adult stem cells makes the debate over embryonic cells moot, he could safely discuss his role in the decision. I would have preferred that he publish this sooner.

What comes through most clearly is how seriously the President took this decision, and how much effort he put into hearing all relevant voices in the debate. The process took months, and involved interviews with dozens of experts in relevant fields, as well as Congressmen, ethicists, lawyers, and even a reading of Fahrenheit 451. During the process, the President refused to consider political expediency:

When a member of the National Right to Life delegation took out a public-opinion poll to bolster his claim that opposition to stem-cell research would be a winning issue politically, Bush swatted the paper away and replied with uncommon sharpness: “This is too important an issue to take polls about. I am going to decide this based on what I believe is right.”

It becomes clear that the 2004 campaign by Democrats to paint the President as anti-science was opportunistic partisanship (as though there were ever any serious doubt on the point.) Take a look:

…in an interview with the New York Times shortly before Bush’s August speech, Irving Weissman of Stanford (director of Stanford’s Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine) stated that “a finite number [of stem-cell lines] would be sufficient. If we had 10-15 lines, no one would complain…” There had already been two decades of research using embryonic stem cells derived from mice, and 90 percent of that research had been conducted using only five distinct lines.

…Weissman would later change his tune and become one of the President’s most persistent critics.

I find the abuse of science for partisan political purposes particularly offensive. Scientists have a right to their political opinions, but when their scientific opinions get bent for the sake of partisanship, the scientific process is damaged, possibly irreparably. One day I’ll write at length about the political left’s habitual misuse of science to create a false patina of legitimacy over their favorite cultural memes. There have been a dozen topics over the last four decades where leftist researchers have performed improperly-conducted research for the purpose of bolstering political positions, including abortion, feminism, homosexuality, smoking, and global climate change. In my post immediately preceding this one, I believe I uncovered an instance of a buddy-system-inspired “study” to buttress the left’s pet argument on photo IDs for voters, although it’s hard to be certain.

This is very serious stuff; if the public comes to see the sciences as the tool of political partisans and not an objective exercise, it will be difficult to sustain support for continued research. Worse, if peer review breaks down, the sciences will not be trustworthy.

I’m not a huge fan of George W. Bush; I even called him an idiot in a post last week (for signing the Energy bill). But I’m deeply grateful that we had a man of genuine conscience in the Oval Office when this question regarding embryos and research came up, and not a partisan hack; and I feel certain that history will owe President Bush an apology for all the times he was called stupid, thoughtless, incurious, and all the other ways he’s been maligned.