Powerline Blog sums up my thoughts
here on the presidential election and what the primary results in North Carolina and Indiana mean.
While I'd hoped that some kind of miracle would give the Republicans a chance in this election, I just don't see it. Sure, maybe something will happen that will swing the election in our favor. Like Obama getscaught in bed with a live man or a dead woman kind of thing.
But barring that or something unforeseen, I don't see how the GOP can win during this election cycle. I'm not giving up, of course. But sometimes you press on with little hope of victory, make the other guys earn it, and be ready if they stumble.
For me, though, I'm going to have to face up to a President Obama in the White House for the next four years. It's strange -- conservatives have regained power with all our important allies, including Canada, France and Germany (even London just elected a conservative mayor). They've finally understood what Dubya was getting at in the War on Terror.
And at this moment, the U.S. has decided to stick its head in the sand and elect the most leftist president in U.S. history. A likely scenario:
* He'll nominate activist judges -- which means millions more unborn children will die and millions of souls, without repentance, will be lost.
* He'll pull us out of Iraq, which will destroy our credibility not only abroad, but at home. He'll release the terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, putting our national security at risk. He'll conduct foreign policy with a naivete not seen since Jimmy Carter, likely with the same results.
* His economic policies will involve greater interventions in the market, which will prevent recovery of this downturn section of a normal business cycle. You can expect higher taxes -- in many cases, much higher taxes. He may scuttle free trade agreements, setting off an international trade war.
* Identity politics at the level normally seen only in universities will come to all of America.
* We made see federalized same-sex marriage, permanently destroying the concept of marriage in this country and declaring traditional and religious culture "bigoted" and most Americans "bigots" -- and more souls will be lost and the entire concept of marriage, already under attack for so long, undermined. The Catholic Church, which had to get out of the adoption business in Massachusetts because of SSM, may face continued pressure to abandon its principles or get out of the charity business.
* He may even prosecute members of the Bush Administration, including Dubya himself and Dick Cheney largely over policy differences, setting a Third-World-style precedent that would damage our centuries-old history of the peaceful transfer of power.
And worse, millions of Americans will cheer this on, having no idea what they're doing.
George Washington and the Founding Fathers stressed that a republic depends on the virtue of the people. When a people no longer remember history, even recent history, when they embrace the same-old heresies in the name of the Imperial Autonomous Self, when they embrace political correctness and other forms of totalitarianism that make it impossible to speak the truth, when they apostasize and declare themselves pagans and non-believers, when they allow themselves to be distracted by trivia and numbed by electronic amusements ranging from Internet pornography to television to video games, when they mock what's holy and sacred and embrace what's perverted and profane, when they feel themselves entitled to try (and fail) to rewrite the laws of nature and natural categories in the name of their own fantasical abstractions ... well, the writing's on the wall. They are spending the moral and religious capital of the past, and while in the U.S.'s case, it's a lot, it's not infinite.
Of course, Obama isn't the problem as much as a symptom of a fundamental underlying spiritual and moral rot in the Democratic Party. Decades of supporting abortion-on-demand has so damaged its ethos that it now, unashamedly and even brazenly, supports the culture of death in all its facets.
The Catholic Church makes it clear what it means to vote for a "pro-choice" politician -- it imperils your soul. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict 16) said in 2004:
"A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia.
"When a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons."
Proportionate reasons. That is, something would offset 4,000 daily killings of the most vulnerable members of our society, not to mention that perversion of reason involved in supporting that. One possible: Voting for a politican whose position on abortion is less extreme than another's.
Obama, as a Illinois legislator, fought for partial-birth abortion. He's a scissors-in-the-head guy.
Lest I beat up on the Democrats too much, let me make it clear -- it was the Republicans who gave this ground to the Democrats.
Dubya over-reached in certain areas, such as secret courts and secret CIA prisons and to an extent, interrogation tactics. Rather than simply bomb Afghanistan back to the pre-stone age, Dubya got us involved in two nation-building projects, which, frankly, usually don't work at the point of a gun, or even not at the point of a gun. Nonetheless, somehow our military has put up a hell of an effort -- and we've got a shot at succeeding, at least in Iraq.
Other over-reaches and eff-ups: Rather than put together a commonsense approach to airline security (such as El Al's, which involves profiling), he went with a PC-style security system that humiliates everyone and treats everyone as a suspect. The GOP spent like drunken sailors and oversaw one of the largest increases in the U.S. budget in history and damaged the economy with massive deficits. He has twice sent out needless, politically motivated and budget-busting tax rebates.
He (and the GOP) allowed the dollar to get weak, didn't intervene during the housing bubble with timely regulation, over-reacted to Enron with the disastrous Sarbanes-Oxley (which dampened our long economic expansion during his tenure), and put together the nonsensical No Child Left Behind Act, which demands, the nearest I can tell, all children to be above average - and vastly increases the Feds' role in state and local concerns, namely, the education of children.
Worse, the GOP isn't supposed to stand for any of those things: Less business regulation, budgetary discipline, lower spending, not nation-building. not tax rebates, not federal intervention in state and local matters, common sense, not PC, security solutions, sound fiscal policies, and intervening in markets only when it's clear that rampant and irresponsible speculation has taken over (e.g., the housing bubble), and the rule of law. When I voted for Dubya and the GOP, I didn't vote for any of those over-reaches. Yet there they are.
And worst of all, despite his fundamental decency, he was a terrible communicator. And we in the GOP all knew that last point when we nominated him in 2000. The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves.
And because of that, the Dems have an opportunity they never should've had.
Last, let me make it clear that while the Democratic Party is for the most part the Party of Sin, Sickness, Evil and Death, its members are not necessarily so. According to Christian teaching, we are not fighting our fellow man -- our battles against each other are manifestations of a spiritual battle -- a clash of worldviews, a clash that cannot be won with words, or even elections, but only by God and our ability to love one another. You rarely can talk someone to the truth about abortion (and that's the central moral issue with Democrats)-- you can only love them, one person at at time, until they think and feel and experience the sanctity of human life at such a deep level that abortion seems unthinkable, and horrific.
Remember what Paul says in Ephesians, "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places."
Of course, the future being what it is, unpredictable, Obama may turn out to betray all those leftist principles and end up selling out the Democrats worse than the Democrats sold us out.
I'll bet this post generates comments :)
