Squaring the Culture

As though he’d been reading my most recent posts (but he’s really just commenting on matters that concern us all,) Patterico today uses David Horowitz’s caution against a growing Obama Derangement as a touchstone to launch his own thoughts about keeping the conservative message sane:

I spent eight years watching a crazy set of people on the left use every trick in the book to attack and tear down President Bush on a personal level. They seized on every maladroit turn of phrase to suggest that he was a moron. They distorted his policy pronouncements, trumped up phony issues, and displayed an unyielding self-righteousness that justified literally any tactic used in service of their political ends. This is why they felt comfortable demonizing Bush to the point where they compared him to Hitler.

Remember how we hated that?

Now that our guy is out of power, we have to decide: did we hate those tactics because they were wrong? Or only because they were used in service of the other guy? (Patterico’s emphasis, not mine)

I do not want to see us becoming the conservative nutroots. It is not, as some suggest, that I am some “country club Republican.” I despise those people. It is because I do not want to become that which I hate. When we make a mountain out of the molehill of Obama’s birth certificate; when we seize on a “Special Olympics” joke as the Height of Outrage and manufacture trumped-up howling rather than dismissing it as a dumb thing to say; when we insist on comparing Obama to mass murderers . . . when these things happen, we are becoming what we hated.

You actually have to read Horowitz’s column at FrontPageMag to grasp the sense of Patterico’s concern. Horowitz’s basic message is, “Stop making such a fuss, Obama is a typical Democrat, not the Antichrist.”

Patterico agrees that we must not engage in the sort of histrionics that the left engaged in, but then disagrees that we’re doing so when it comes to matters of liberty:

And this is where I disagree with Horowitz. Horowitz says:

So what’s the panic? It is true that Obama has shown surprising ineptitude in his first months in office, but he’s not a zero with no accomplishments as many conservatives seem to think – unless you regard beating the Clinton machine and winning the presidency as nothing. But in doing this you fall into the “Bush-is-an-idiot” bag of liberal miasmas.

It is also true Obama has ceded his domestic economic agenda to the House Democrats and spent a lot of money in the process. But what’s the surprise in this?

No, it’s no surprise, but that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. We now have a situation where the CEO of a major American car company is resigning at the behest of the American president, and everyone is nodding their heads as though it makes perfect sense. It doesn’t. This is insanity. (Patterico’s emphasis) Putting the government in charge of our economy is socialism. It represents the end of capitalism, and without capitalism, there is no freedom.

I would go even further than Patterico. The surprise, to answer Mr. Horowitz, is the sheer rapidity and oppressiveness of the wave of statist legislation. It’s as though they listed everything they’ve failed to accomplish in the last 40 years and passed it all in a single day. I don’t recall a similar sea change in my entire adult life; the closest I’d seen was Reagan’s slow, steady roll-back of mindless statist policy from the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years, but that took several years, not a mere two months.

Horowitz provides the evidence that Obama is not merely a typical Democrat in his article, noting that even the House Democrats are beginning to push back against his initiatives, and that the speed and extremity of his measures so far have solidified conservative opposition in a way nothing else could. He also correctly identifies that the US’ liberals have now become typically European socialists:

…while it’s reasonable to be unhappy with a Democratic administration and even concerned because the Democrats are now a socialist party in the European sense, we are not witnessing the coming of the anti-Christ

And the danger goes beyond what Patterico observes, as well. I do believe that liberty is the central need of the human heart, and the greatest loss of the opening months of the Obama administration, but it’s useless even to speak of liberty when there’s no economy, and what we’ve been seeing actually endangers the operation of the nation. I’d been wondering all my life when it might occur that the government actually spent more than the American economy could pay back. It looks plausible that we’ve reached that point a mere 3 months into the Era of Obama. We’re talking about $1 trillion and $2 trillion-dollar annual deficits as though they were no different from the $450 billion deficit that seemed so large during the Bush years — which, I should point out, set the new record high just last year. Foreign investors are noticing and running the other direction.

I’ve actually made the prediction myself that Obama policy intentions could lead to holocausts. I don’t expect such a thing to occur during a four-year Obama administration, or even really during an eight-year Obama administration. I do expect that if America adopts neo-Marxist ethical conventions, within about 20 years we’ll be endorsing euthanasia among America’s elderly, and that given the demographics of the Boomer generation, that will lead to a huge wave of voluntary euthanasia that is neither truly voluntary nor truly euthanasia. Jonah Goldberg thinks American fascism will never mimic Soviet or German fascism in its murderousness, because the American character is so basically friendly; but Americans have terminated more pregnancies than any nation in history — some 50 million or more — and thus seem susceptible to rationalizing “mercy” killings where they would not condone political ones.

I also believe we are correct to fear suppression and criminalization of conservative views, as progressives have been articulating precisely that already. That was the point of this article of mine, which also invokes the possibility of future holocausts here in America.

If this puts me among the “conservative nutroots,” then so be it; I’m looking at broad trends and drawing conclusions regarding where they lead. I could easily be mistaken; I’ve made mistakes before. Convince me that I’m mistaken about the trends, and I’ll stop predicting the outcomes; but don’t bother telling me that I can’t say something because it’s unthinkable, because that’s unpersuasive. Holocausts are always unthinkable — until they occur. It can happen here.

Certainly, there should be no full-bore demonization of Obama based on nothing but hatred. Yes, we should refuse to engage in the dishonest tactics of our adversaries. However, there’s no shame in crying “Wolf!” if there’s a wolf in the fold. Is Barack Obama the Antichrist? Hardly likely. Is he Josef Stalin? Certainly not yet. But, is he ushering in a regime that seems likely to destroy the things that make America unique and important? Absolutely, yes; not just to destroy them, but to destroy them quickly and decisively. This requires a response.

High on the Internet hit scales this morning is a poll by the Washington Post and ABC News (actual results here) suggesting that Americans do not blame President Obama for the downturn in the economy. That’s fine, as far as it goes — the downturn was caused by a long-term collaboration between progressive activists, corrupt politicians, greedy speculators, dishonest home buyers and mortgage merchants, clueless Fed policy, and poorly-constructed financial ratings, and Obama was not President for most of that. However, the most impressive take from the poll demonstrates that the Obama administration continues to fool the American public regarding its true nature and intentions, and that the public really has no clue what’s going on.

Here’s the key question in my view:

13. Which of these statements comes closer to your view:

Beneath it all, Obama is an old-style, tax-and-spend Democrat. -OR-
Obama is a new-style Democrat who will be careful with the public’s money.

Old-style 32
New-style 62
Neither (vol.) 3
No opinion 3

Notice that the question is phrased as a binary choice, which suggests to the subject that he or she must choose between two options. The third category (”Neither”) was not part of the question, but was volunteered (hence, “vol.”) by an astute 3% of the subjects. The fact that 62% regard Obama as something new and more responsible than the old, tax-and-spend Democrats, creates the impression that the Democratic party in general, and Obama in particular, have been successful in duping the public into buying into a new marketing image. The question itself is part of the disinformation; it’s hard to say, based on the question, what the public truly thinks, but it does seem so suggest public acquiescence with the Obama administration’s strategy.

Obama is something new, alright, but not something more responsible. The question shows that Americans are not being made aware of the magnitude of government spending under the Obama administration, nor of the possible consequences of that spending. Call this a success for the news/propaganda ministry of the Obama administration, by which I mean ABC News, CBS News, the Washington Post, and so forth.

In a much fairer binary choice that produces a more meaningful statistic, Americans show a greater degree of caution concerning the level of spending, but still not as high as it ought to be.

10. Which of these do you think is more important right now – (increasing federal spending to try to improve the economy, even if it sharply increases the federal budget deficit); or (avoiding a big increase in the federal budget deficit, even if it means not increasing federal spending to try to improve the economy)?

3/29/09
Increasing spending 49
Avoiding deficit 47
No opinion 5

1/16/09
Increasing spending 51
Avoiding deficit 44
No opinion 4

Buttressing the appearance of success for the propaganda campaign is the number of Americans who express the insupportable notion that the real cause of the downturn is irresponsible, big corporations. Sixty-eight percent express anger at banks, 68% at corporations, 60% at the Bush administration, but only 21% express anger at the Obama administration (for pursuing the same policies as the Bush administration.)

The decades-long, anti-capitalist stream of American education and entertainment has taken its toll, so that Americans-in-the-street are increasingly credulous when anybody points a finger of accusation at a big business for any reason. There’s no real thought behind it, aside from “Big Corporation = Baaaaaad.” It’s actually a pretty easy sale for government propagandists: most people feel powerless in the face of increasingly distant business entities that engage in activities they understand less and less. In the meantime, nobody is making the case that the incentives that sometimes provoke businessmen to make decisions that harm rather than help the consumer, even more frequently provoke government bureaucrats and politicians to make decisions that harm rather than help the public. Businesses face real, negative consequences when they dismiss the consumer’s best interests (or, they would if the government wouldn’t shield them;) politicians seldom do, because they can buy votes with pork and favors.

Gateway Pundit makes the interesting point that the business community is not going along with the general approval of Obama’s policies, but instead strongly disapproves of them. This is natural; they actually understand what the economy is doing, and they get their news from purveyors of accurate statistics, not from the headlines on CNN or the Washington Post. They can see the train wreck from a long way off. As occurred when the business community diverged from public opinion regarding both Reagan and Carter, the business community will turn out to have been correct about Obama as well.

Two very good articles about leftist tactics over the weekend that you need to read if you have not. The first is from the Speedo King Himself, The Other McCain, who holds forth on what he’s now calling the Ransom-Note Method, the tactic where media flacks lift a word here, a phrase there, from some popular figure or talk show and paste it together into a gasp-inducing scandal.

The second is Andrew Breitbart observing the tactics of seminar-calling and internet propaganda and calling for coordinated Republican responses. Says Breitbart:

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way – all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its “idealism” in a most cynical fashion.

The ends justify the means for them – now more than ever.

Dan Riehl produces an interesting reaction to Breitbart that fits remarkably well with the pair of articles, and in fact repeats one of McCain’s explanations for why the Ransom Note method works — Republicans need to get tougher.

But few if any of the somewhat Right-leaning stalwarts Breitbart sees himself as speaking to have the balls to say much of anything seriously antagonistic at all. They’re happy for whatever crumbs of legitimacy they can gather as they stumble about more worried about their own credibility, than any ideological fight.

Give me a freaking break here, Breitbart. The Right on line doesn’t need to be infiltrated. It has long been nurturing the seeds of its own destruction by elevating people who have already swallowed most of the little blue liberal pill of political correctness in a chase for prestige, or cash.

Riehl expresses contempt for some of my favorites, actually, taking Ed Morrissey and Paterico to task for going easy on the likes of Joe Biden’s daughter. Personally, I think he’s out of line going after those two in particular, but I feel his pain. It’s a particularly Republican disease to give in to the finger-wagging, shaming noise of the mindless left in the hope that they might treat us like human beings for a change. Sadly, though, that’s a vain hope; they’re not trying to obtain good behavior (in fact, most of them would not know good behavior if it bit their nether parts in two,) they’re simply trying to shut us up.

It feels both unfair and futile to adhere to rules of decent conduct while our enemies lie, cheat, distort, abuse, and sneer, but it’s important to walk righteously. There’s no reason to be gentle with fools — there’s actually a chance they may benefit if you’re rough with them — but we should never descend to their level of dishonesty or vitriol, and sometimes, an even temper produces powerful persuasion. However, there is no point in engaging in discussion activists who are engaged in dishonest tactics; they are not persuadable, and any response other than peremptory dismissal aids their cause.

These calls for a meaner, rougher conservatism may indicate that the free republic is already a thing of the past. John Adams correctly observed, while encouraging a Massachusetts militia, that the US Constitution is suitable only for a religious and moral nation, and that human sin unimpeded by moral training can tear through the barrier of the Constitution “like a whale goes through a net.” It is not clear that a free society can survive a takedown by organized Marxists engaging in systematic dissembling to unmoor the culture from its religious moorings and take over the centers of cultural propagation; it appears that ours has been taken down by precisely this attack.

The correct response has to be distinctly and explicitly Christian, because liberty arises out of Christianity. However, far too many Christians think that a distinctly Christian response means a mild, friendly, and polite response. Most of the people who think so, don’t appreciate the roughness of the culture out of which Christianity arose. As Breitbart observes, the correct name for much of the left’s Internet tactic is “malicious vandalism,” and the godly response to malicious vandalism is not polite conversation. It’s time to soldier up.

The Obama administration today fired GM’s Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner in what it’s calling a last-ditch effort to save the ailing automaker from bankruptcy. Federal auto industry czar Steve Rattner, former investment banker, said that the recovery plan submitted by GM was not sufficient to restore the company’s viability.

The move is probably right, and the reason also probably right. However, it comes too late and from the wrong direction. I’m wracking my memory, and cannot discover anywhere in the US Constitution the authority for the executive branch to operate take over and operate private companies.

The violation of American Constitutional government took place 6 months ago, during the last days of the Bush administration. The government has loaned GM some $13.4 billion for operating capital since then, apparently believing that the economic impact of allowing GM to declare bankruptcy was too great for the nation to sustain. That fear was poppycock at the time, and remains poppycock; GM is the victim of long-term, lousy management decisions, bad engineering, weak marketing, and union bullying. But crock or not, the operation of private corporations is among the powers reserved to the states or to the people in the 10th Amendment.

The automaker should never have asked for government assistance. It should never have been granted government assistance. The decision to oust President Wagoner should have been made by GM’s Board of Directors. The oversight of GM’s recovery plan should have been performed by GM’s Board of Directors. The choice to continue operation or declare bankruptcy should have been made between GM’s Board of Directors and the banks that held GM’s operating loans — and none of those banks should have been the federal government.

What I’m saying is, the unconstitutional nationalization of American industry is a Bush-Obama collaboration. Today’s decision merely slams home the reality — we are well on the way to becoming a socialist nation.

Sooner or later one of the private corporations accepting TARP funds is going to grow a testosterone factory and challenge the coercive Obama administration in court. They should win, as the Court recognizes the limits of executive authority. Some banks are already working very hard to escape the TARP trap. Wagoner is not the guy to do it, though, since he asked for federal funding and is as much at fault in GM’s demise as anybody else.

UPDATE: A fairly rude fellow from Sadly, No! objected to the sentence in my second paragraph, in which I stated that I could not discover from the Constitution authority for the executive branch to operate private companies. This is, in fact, muddled. I’ve corrected the sentence.

I said in the comments, below, that there are two, separate violations of the Constitution in this act: first, the executive branch does not have the authority to create private companies, and second, that neither the Congress nor the President has the Constitutional right to take over private companies owned by private citizens. I believe this was closer, but still not precisely correct.

In 1952, President Harry Truman attempted to seize the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company in an effort to head off a strike by the United Steel Workers that would have damaged the country’s war effort in Korea. The Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v Sawyer (1952) upheld an injunction by a lower court preventing the President from doing so. The Court declared that the President had no authority to seize a private company without either specific authorization under Article II of the Constitution or a specific act of the legislature.

This suggests that while Obama’s act is, in fact, unconstitutional in that the executive has no authority either to create a private company or to operate one without specific legislative approval, it might be constitutional for Congress to declare a private company subject to federal control due to national emergency, and when that’s been done, the President could in fact operate a private company. I really need the opinion of a constitutional scholar to explain under what conditions Congress could properly establish federal control over a private corporation, and it’s possible that the question has never really been settled.

What I’ve posted here is a 40-minute interview, but please don’t shoot me. I don’t insist that you listen to the whole thing, I’ve just included it in case you want to hear it; I’ve excerpted what I consider the most important part and printed it below.

The interview is one by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution for Uncommon Knowledge, a site that I’ve enjoyed immensely as an intellectually-satisfying substitute for Charlie Rose, who 1) is on too late for me to catch, and 2) whom I can barely stand because he’s so far to the left on so many cultural issues. Robinson is interviewing Andrew Klavan: novelist, conservative, Christian, who recently published a novel entitled Empire of Lies in which an ordinary, Midwestern, suburban, Christian fellow gets plunged back into his prior life in chic New York City and into a world of international intrigue.

There are lots of things in the interview that are worth quoting, but the one I want to draw attention to today occurs at about the 36½-minute mark. It’s transcribed below:

Robinson: Here’s a quotation from Empire of Lies.

“The day it began was an autumn day, a Saturday afternoon in October. I was sitting in a cushioned chair on the brick patio on the edge of my backyard, looking down half an acre of grassy slope to where my two boys were organizing some kind of Frisbee game around the swing set. I loved our neighborhood, Horizon Hill, “the Hill” for short; big yards, craftsman houses, lake views, friendly, mostly like-minded people, hard-working dads, housewife moms, not too many divorces, lots of kids.”

Andrew Klavan, I charge you with having become irretrievably bourgeois. (Klavan laughs) You are attempting to do something that cannot be done. You are a novelist; you seek to inhabit the world of the entertaining, the hip, the cool, and yet here you are as a Christian and a conservative, holding up for praise the square, the unhip, the conventional … you will never be cool again.

Klavan: (laughs) I may never be cool again. I’ll certainly never be called cool again. And yet, I cannot help but think that at the center of the arts, because it’s the center of human life, is the experience of love. And that love is not excluded from the suburbs. It’s not excluded from the bourgeois life. It never was. It never has been. It frequently finds its best ground to grow in there.

My life is deeply affected by my marriage. which is an anomalous marriage in its romance. It’s been a 30-year romance, and I know that’s anomalous, I know that’s not something that everybody gets. And yet, it does give you an insight that this is a possibility, that love in marriage is a possibility.

It seems to me that that possibility has been excluded by the so-called avant garde, who really are the behind guard. It seems to me that that possibility has been excluded, and that putting it forward is in fact a revolutionary act, that putting it down is in fact saying, “You know what, this is here, you can’t close your eyes to it, you can’t constantly tell us that all marriages are ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ without us coming back and saying ‘You know what, I live in this neighborhood, and I see marriages that aren’t like that at all.’”

One of the things the cultural and sexual revolutions have robbed us of, of which we are seldom aware, is the notion of ordinary love. Modern novels paint ordinary life as bleak, meaningless, and tawdry. Movies like Crash and American Beauty, both winners of the Academy’s award for Best Picture, speak of suburban life as “pathetic” and “little,” and speak of suburban people as blind and narrow, having missed most of the life around them, concerned only with petty greeds and meaningless toys.

This is slander. There exists life that is decent and meaningful, and it happens most frequently in ordinary places. None of us lives a life of constant bliss; life is hard, and is meant to be hard. It takes courage to live. However, for as hard a place as it is, our world has a surprising abundance of love and meaning, and it’s available to most of us at very close quarters. The things that really matter, the things at the very heart of the universe, are at home.

In fact, Klavan hits the nail squarely, and I think it’s revelation from God: at the very heart of life, at the center, is Love. Those novelists and script-writers who paint life as bleak and forbidding are people who have missed the real center of the universe — or, perhaps, have deliberately abandoned it — and are writing about the ragged edges where the lost live. Some others, who understand instinctively that there must exist something worthwhile but don’t know where it is, offer political goals outside of themselves as the source of true meaning. Those who know God, though, know that behind every event, behind every unexpected and even unwelcome twist of life, there lurks a love so deep and a mirth so vast that we cannot possibly imagine it. It is there that those who are truly satisfied with life find their center.

It is time to recover the wonder of the ordinary. To quote something else Klavan says in the interview:

Robinson: (regarding Hollywood) … is there going to be just kind of a healthy turnover or is there more a kind of enduring ideological fight that has to be fought?

Klavan: I’m very optimistic. I think there is an enduring ideological fight that has to be fought. I think the reason [Hollywood studio heads] are a lagging indicator — perfect phrase for them because they are straight jacketed by their ideology, they’re the most conformist group of people, backward group of people you can imagine. But we conservatives have let them get away with this. I’ve said this again and again, if you win the White House, if you win the
Congress, if you win the Supreme Court and lose the culture, you’ll lose the country. It is the culture that… Shelley was right, the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. It will take a longer time, but if you lose the culture, if you let them drip this poison into the consciousness of America forever, they will win. And I think it really is going to require, I’m very optimistic about it, is going to require an effort to take the culture back from these people who are, as you say, conformists, backward, being in the ideology a generation ago.

I’m not saying that all films and plays must portray healthy families, but Frank Capra proved that one can make compelling art without dismissing the wonder of ordinary home life. This is just one of the many battles that must be fought to win back sane culture from the Merchants of Cultural Suicide, but it’s a central one. Never forget: right there next to you in suburbia, you can find somebody whose life is decent, who loves their spouse and their kids, and who finds satisfaction in the ordinary things. Maybe it’s you. You are not alone; you are the hopeful possible.

This is the beginning, I hope, of a new, conservative activism. April 15 — Tax Day — has become the focus for a national movement of TEA Party demonstrations. Demonstrations will be held in at least 300 American cities. I plan to participate in the demonstration at the State House in Boston, MA, although I’m considering hosting a local Tea Party event here in Dennis.

Anybody interested in participating in or hosting a Tea Party event in their town should visit one of two organizing sites:

Tax Day Tea Party (TaxDayTeaParty.com)

National TEA Party Day (TeaPartyDay.com)

The Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress have gone too far. There exists no Constitutional authority for the government to seize US businesses. Government spending more than 25% of GDP is intrinsically tyrannical. None of us agreed to government power of this magnitude, and we are not obliged to tolerate it.

I’ll see you there. Liberty or Death!

Everybody needs to read this. This is a letter of resignation from one Jake DeSantis, who worked for AIG. He is the recipient of one of those retention bonuses, and he explains why he feels the need to resign, and also to donate the proceeds of his labor to families suffering from the economic downturn. Most emphatically, his reason is not that the bonus was not earned. Quite the contrary; it was earned, but he wants very badly to make sure that none of the politicians who are so cynically abusing his good faith efforts benefits even the slightest from the income he has earned. I don’t disagree with a single word of this.

I’ve excerpted what I consider the meat of the letter, but please visit the Times and read the whole thing.

DEAR Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down…

I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut…

I think your initial decision to honor the contracts was both ethical and financially astute, but it seems to have been politically unwise. It’s now apparent that you either misunderstood the agreements that you had made — tacit or otherwise — with the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, various members of Congress and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York, or were not strong enough to withstand the shifting political winds.

You’ve now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings…

As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.’s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you.

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press…

That is why I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need…

I’ll continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped, but after what’s happened this past week I can’t remain much longer — there is too much bad blood. I’m not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least Attorney General Blumenthal should be relieved that I’ll leave under my own power and will not need to be “shoved out the door.”

Sincerely,

Jake DeSantis

The Obama administration’s war against the “rich” — indeed, the Democratic party’s long-standing, ongoing war against the “rich” — is a hell-inspired thing. People are entitled to the money they’ve earned, whether some useful idiot deceived by Marxists gets jealous of it or not. I had to restrain myself from uttering curses toward those tyrants who are abusing the hard work of men like DeSantis for political advantage, but when their condemnation comes from on high, it will have been deserved. Workmen are entitled to the wages for which they’ve worked, and nothing in the size of the check changes that fact.

And in case anybody reading this has had his or her clear thinking distorted by the lies of hell-inspired Marxists and their willing apologists in the Democratic party, remember — if they can do this to the “rich” simply because they’re rich, they can do it to you for whatever reason they concoct. Either the law is king, or it is not, and if it is not, you are not safe. Ever.

Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.

James 5:4, The Bible, New Revised Standard Edition

By the bye, Attorneys General Blumenthal and Cuomo are following in the footsteps of the tyrant Eliot Spitzer, about whom I wrote about a year ago. You might want to reacquaint yourselves, as this appears to be the motus operandi of the hard left, and your future if you happen to be one of those who earns a decent wage in America. Remember what I said a few days ago: the same system that permits the ordinary person to prosper, permits the extraordinary person to profit extraordinarily — and you cannot remove the latter without demolishing the former.

Hello all, Darkhorse here, hopefully fulfilling Phil’s request not to just try and make people mad (especially at me).

First, thanks to Dullhammer for the church stories – which are always among the funniest, because of how we’re “supposed” to act at church.

Now, some commentary.  Phil has discovered that one of the things that bothers me the most is when someone puts their brain in autopilot and begins to blindly follow an ideology.  People of every political stripe are guilty of this, of course, but some of the transgressions get to see the light of day far more than others.  I would appreciate anyone who has the time to help me out with this one:

Phil mentioned here that, not only did Barack Obama (whom I voted for) reinstate federal funding for stem cell research (which I support on a limited basis)…but that he cut funding for research into alternative ways to develop stem cells outside of using human embryos.

If he really thought through this one, I think this is unconscionable to me.

But I don’t think he really thought it through.  I think on this count that he is simply making decisions as a slave to an ideology, an ideology which is informed by his pro-choice friends.

Remember, I don’t necessarily oppose all abortion, even as a Christian.  But I oppose turning your brain off and serving your ideology.  Of course, there are times in my life where my mind seems to be telling me one thing, and God seems to be telling me something else (via the Bible, the Holy Spirit, or something else); at that time, it is proper to give God the right-of-way.  But that never requires turning my brain off…only vetoing what it says.

The help I’m asking you for is this:  I really don’t believe Obama is an evil man any more than George W. Bush was an evil man.  So help me: is there some charitable explanation for what Obama did in shutting off the funding for alternative sources for stem cells, assuming Obama was thinking this through?   Assuming the best of someone first is of great value to me, but I’m having a hard time with this one…

Phil is away until Thursday and he asked me, along with darkhorse, to write an article for you in his absence.  I said I would be honored to do so.  But my qualifications for writing political commentary are just slightly above the people you see interviewed on The Tonight Show’s “Jay Walking” clips.  Phil did say I could write a religious article, as I am a pastor by day, though he did warn me not to bad mouth him or promote outright heresy. 

 In that spirit I have decided to give you a change of pace and tell you a couple of stories. 

 True story.  I was checking my answering machine one day and heard the recording of a lady in my church leave a short message and then hang up.  Only thing is the answering machine didn’t exactly hang up in return and the recording rolled on.  The answering machine evidently then initiated a dial tone and next thing I know that same lady is answering her phone. (I felt like I was a party to a prank phone call.)  Of course the answering machine didn’t say anything.  But it did record the lady saying, “Hello.  Hello?  Hello?!”  And then she hung up with one of those disgusted, just-short-of-cursing sounds.  Later I told her about it and, after getting over the shock of such a strange happening, she said, “Good thing I didn’t swear; you’d have it on tape forever!” 

 Another adventure with a phone doing something out of the ordinary was when I was rehearsing with a choir in a good sized church in Bangor, Maine.  As we were singing away I could hear what sounded like a phone ringing.  This was pre-cell phone days, when phones sounded like . . . like phones!  Not like Beethoven’s Fur Elise in a can.  But when we’d stop singing the phone would be silent and I wouldn’t be quite sure what I heard.  And mind you, I knew of no phone in that area of the church.  The office was in a completely separate building. 

 Well, the following week at choir practice again, I heard that ringing again.  But this time I stopped what I was doing and took off in the direction of that distinct ringing.  I had no idea where I was going except for following a sound that shouldn’t even exist.  It led me down the aisle, out into the lobby and to the south east corner of the building where the ringing was clearly coming from the elevator.  I quickly opened the door, rolled back the inner gate and answered the phone. 

 I was expecting God, of course.  But what I got was (you guessed it) a telemarketer.  He must have been making his way down a page full of numbers—one of which had to be for the church’s elevator.  The voice started right in with the pitch. 

 “Hello sir, I’m calling to let you know about . . .”

 I don’t remember what he was selling.  But I do remember my reply.  And I’ll bet he does too.  After he spoke for a minute or so, I simply stopped him and said,  “Do you realize you’ve just called an elevator?” 

 “A what?” he asked.

 “An elevator.  I’m talking to you from inside an elevator!” 

 “Oh,” was his unscripted reply.  And he hung up. 

 If not for the commandment against lying I would recommend that line for unwanted phone solicitations.  I never heard the phone ring again either.  So it works like a ‘no call’ list as well! 

 Now, speaking of phones and strange things about them: suppose there was a company where you could call and get their phone answering service, order products, check your account, lodge complaints and listen to sales pitches while on hold . . . all the while there was no one on the other end!

 You know the feeling.  I’ve dealt with companies where you really have to wonder if anybody’s there running the shop.  You know what a frustration it is when you have a simple question that simply doesn’t fit into the five listed options.  And you know what a relief it is (usually) when you finally get a human being (who speaks English) on the other end of the line. 

 It is that kind of relief that I find in the story, true story, of Jesus Christ.  It makes all the difference in the world to sense that at the heart of everything there is a Person. 

 Anything less and life is not even a true story.  It’s a lie for even looking like one—perpetrated by something stranger than even my answering machine. 

 Easter will be here in just a few weeks.  I urge you to go to church and listen carefully to the true story of life, death and resurrection found historically in Jesus Christ. 

“When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me.  When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me.  I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.”  –Jesus, in John 12:44-46

DH

I’m trying something new.

I’m flying down to Orlando to help a friend drive from Florida to Massachusetts for the summer, and that means I’ll be out of computer reach for a couple of days. So, I’ve asked two of my regular commenters to write articles for the blog while I’m gone. Assuming everything works (including these two,) for the first time you’ll be seeing somebody other than me posting to Plumb Bob Blog. I will be back on Thursday to pick up where I left off.

Be nice to the new guys, ok? Thanks.