It's Over, But Not Really

In chapter eight of the first book of Samuel, the people of Israel cry out to the prophet Samuel to appoint them a king to rule over them, instead of the direct rule of God through His prophet. In an odd twist, God does not refuse the request of the Israelites; rather, He has Samuel appoint Saul as the first king of Israel. Within three generations the kingship of Israel degenerates into a crushing burden on the backs of the Jews, an oppressive regime of over-taxation, corruption, and debauchery unwilling to answer to God's call for change. God had given the people what they wanted: the glamour and pomp of a secular king, the rule of a human being, a "messiah" of sorts to wave his hand and right the wrongs of the people. It did not take long for the humanity of Israel's kings to show its ugly side. In the act of giving the people what they desired, God let them unwittingly enact His own vengeance on them..

This scenario seems all too familiar.

In 2008, America craved a change in its leadership, in its policies, and in its general direction. John McCain, stodgy and inarticulate, was seen as merely the continuation of eight long years of George Bush's perceived presidential ineptitude. America fell hard for Barack Obama, a dynamic and inspiring figure whose freshness and youthful attitude led to McCain's obliteration at the polls. Democratic rule dominated Washington and the Republican party was left for dead. Things would get done, greedy people would be punished, jobs would be created, the environment would be saved from human ravages. It was a new golden age.

Close to four years passed. Obama's administration bypassed, ignored, or downright contradicted established American law on numerous occasions. Guns went to Mexican drug lords on Obama's watch. Diplomats and SEALS died while Washington watched from afar. The economy continued to sputter and struggle. Money applied to green energy companies disappeared in multiple bankruptcies. A corrupt attorney general chose to prosecute peaceful groups opposed to his agenda, whilst leaving other known criminals to live free. The list goes on and on.

And yet, at the end of the day as we all know by now, Barack Obama was not only reelected as president, he was reelected with a rock-solid margin of victory. Mitt Romney did not just lose, Obama won. Big. Again.

I was listening to the radio Tuesday night after the election results came in, and there was all manner of finger-pointing. Some blamed Obama's ground game being more formidable than originally thought, others blamed a Republican candidate who was not as articulate expressing conservative ideals as a Ronald Reagan might have been. And then the funniest and saddest (in my opinion) excuse for the loss came from a Republican operative who blamed everything on Senator wannabes Mourdock and Akin's abortion remarks. The GOP leadership almost immediately began calling for a toned down approach to abortion and social issues in their campaigns, essentially blaming their electoral hemorrhaging on a "misguided" attempt to hold the high moral ground.

Essentially that view is correct. But in expressing that view Republicans have made a diagnosis of themselves that even they do not understand. What the Republican Party does not seem to realize is that this election had little to do with a political process failure, a procedural issue that can be re-calibrated in the next election. They are correct in thinking that the abortion remarks brought down both Mourdock's and Akins' campaigns, and maybe Romney's by extension, but their solution to the problem is their own indictment. Barack Obama won a second term because the people are more willing to put their faith in a man than in a God. Obama won because too many of the people who stand for the sacredness of life, marriage, and sacrifice (the proper building blocks of a society) were not only silent but in many cases complicit. The people of God could easily pass for people of the world, and they voted en masse in the guise of the latter.

Catholics hold the most blame in this regard. A long-standing bulwark against the slaughter of innocent people, the leadership of the Catholic Church has grown soft and complacent. There is a good case to be made that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was in large part responsible for the passage of Obamacare, in their starry-eyed frame of mind after hearing the words "universal healthcare." Catholic priests have failed to adequately express from the pulpit the evil of abortion and its corrupting influence on society's moral structure. The number of Catholics using birth control is statistically indistinguishable from secular society's numbers, despite the fact that chemical and mechanical birth control is expressly forbidden by the Church. Divorce rates are similar. The media and entertainment industries continue to barrel headlong towards a fully homosexually integrated culture, with nary a peep from the same Catholic Church. Far from being the light of the world, let alone the light to the United States, Catholics have devolved into a socially embarrassing version of fundamentalist Christian.

So yes, the Republicans did lose the election in part because of some of their members' remarks about abortion, but not because opposing abortion is a bad platform. Rather, it is because the morals of the American people have evaporated to such a degree that abortion is now a politically losing issue. And to stand for something like the ending of abortion is a career-ending move, so Republicans naturally gravitate towards the mushy lukewarm middle. It is so much easier to compromise one's moral position than to possess a spine and lose.

Democrats in many ways now hold a distinct political advantage. Their party platform is now unambiguous in its support of absolute evils (abortion and the glorification of homosexuality) and people I think gravitate towards absolutes. Especially when those absolutes are as pleasure-seeking and selfish as those the Democrats espouse, and especially in the absence of a strong witness to the truth. Obama's ground game was not merely a GOTV (get out the vote) effort, it was a systematic attempt to create both material and moral dependency on his administration. If you don't believe me, take a look at the following video. This woman is bought and paid for.



The truth is that Obama is an elected official. We the people put him there, maybe not by directly voting for him but quite possibly by not evangelizing the person standing next to us in the grocery checkout line. Obama's corrupt views and morally oppressive policies are a reflection of our lives as citizens. Before we complain that he stands for a tyrannical top-down approach towards the citizens he is meant to govern, we need look no farther than ourselves for the blessing he got to proceed.

So I urge all those people who still refuse to participate in the group-think of secularism to consider two things: number one, realize that we do not have a political problem on our hands, so much as we have a serious moral and social corruption problem; and two, live your life according to the actual dictates of your faith in a visible manner. Especially after this election is no time to hide what we believe, but to make absolutely sure that the truth is on display for the next four years in a way that it hasn't been in this country for many years.

It is time to pick a side. Not a party, not a candidate, but a clearly delineated moral side based on absolute truths. Proclaiming the truth will not necessarily win elections in the short run, but it may win hearts. A democracy (or representative republic) is only as good as the people that constitute it, and when the people are corrupt their leaders will necessarily follow. However, the opposite is also true. When enough people come to realize the true scope and evil of abortion, they will demand its censure by law while simultaneously eliminating the demand for it. When enough people come to grips with the fact that homosexuality erodes the core of a healthy and growing society, then the "gay marriage" argument will cease to hold any political water. And so on...

None of these good things will exist, however, if the truth is not shouted from every rooftop regardless of who we think is listening. I think we failed this time around. Let's not fail again.



Photo by Roxanne Jo Mitchell, via Wikipedia.

Good Guys

Voting Machine

I would like to offer a reflection on the upcoming presidential election.

When I was a little kid, my parents would go out to vote in the presidential election, and when they got back I always had two questions to ask them: (1) You voted for the good guy, right? and (2) Did the good guy win or lose? Yes I was only six or seven years old at the time and my knowledge of politics was...weak at best. But interestingly enough, I think those two questions have, in a way, come to define not only the way that adults vote for candidates, but also how the candidates appeal to the voters.

We'll start with how candidates appeal to voters, as this is generally the launching point of this particular political process. The candidates go about this appeal in two ways: tell the community how great they and their accomplishments are, and/or destroy their opponent with semi-factual invective. They promise to do great things and to do them better (or drastically differently) from the opposition, utilizing the powers of the office they are running for to do so.

The flip-side is also true. Voters are pitched pervasive ideas of the goodness or evil of one candidate or the other, and begin to finalize their choice. They look at the good that one promises to do with the powers of office, or they recoil from the evil that another is said to be planning with the same office. One candidate becomes the “good guy” and the other the “bad guy.” The voter weighs the different facts and/or emotions involved with one guy or the other, and finally makes his choice for one because that one will use the office to get things done, to do good things, to go against the flow.

In essence, with a presidential election nowadays it boils down to this: utilizing the extraordinary powers accumulated by the office of the president, our candidate can do a much better, far more fantastic job of getting things done and moving things along than your guy. Our guy will be more vigilant in killing terrorists than your guy, more creative in stimulating the economy than your guy, more hard-nosed about regulating businesses than your guy, more concerned for the environment than your guy. Our guy will increase defense spending into the stratosphere to keep us safe, or our guy will increase the funding of the EPA one hundredfold to keep our kids safe. And all because our guy uses absolute power for good, and yours uses absolute power for evil.

Perhaps this is a small exaggeration, but I have heard all of these arguments enough times from enough prominent people to believe that frighteningly little of what I just laid out is hyperbole. Did you vote for the good guy, and did he win? Because if he wins, he's gonna do good stuff with his power.

The question manages to almost entirely miss the point. What we might want to look at a little more closely first is not the things our candidates promise to do once in elected office, but the powers of that office that allow them to promise such insane things in the first place.

Since when was the president of the United States authorized to hunt down, indefinitely detain or kill individual people, be they terrorist or otherwise, Americans or otherwise? President Obama just signed that one into law at the beginning of this year, with Republican help. I am sure a Republican president would have found such a law to be just as tempting to sign.

Since when was the president of the United States ever supposed to have the power to stir the economic pot any which way he chose? Within this past decade both President Bush and President Obama have tried doing just that, with stimulus packages, bailouts, takeovers, and government loans. And Mitt Romney is touting his experience as a businessman as a factor of electability, experience he promises to use as president. All of these men either have meddled or propose to meddle to greater or lesser degrees.

And since when has the president had the gall to insist that the people involved in religious institutions violate their consciences?

The list of inflated and ridiculous presidential powers continues to grow with each passing presidency, be it Republican or Democrat. So before we ask whether one guy's policies or positions will be better than the other, let's ask first if they should even have the power to put those policies and positions into practice.

As the saying goes, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There will never be a choice between a strictly “good guy” and a strictly “bad guy,” just between handing the reins of the same power to a better man or a worse man. Those powers should not be any more tempting to abuse than they already are.

Whose Democracy?

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

On December 6th, 2011, the Associated Press put out a story about Hillary Clinton's comments concerning the first elections in Egypt after the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. The story suggested that the United States leadership considered the elections in Egypt to be fair, especially in juxtaposition to the concurrent Russian parliamentary elections. However, Clinton warned in the story that democracies need to hold as unviolable the human rights of their citizenry, in particular their women, and that certain parties who had won majorities in Egypt were a potential roadblock to the establishment of a just democracy.

While this may look like a well-reasoned response to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Nour, both of which are demonstrably hardcore "Islamists," the reality is that the problems with her statement are manifold. In fact, Clinton's reprimand and warning is not only deceptive and naive, but also almost entirely laughable. Forgive me if it seems like I call anything dealing with the revolution in Egypt laughable; quite frankly, I see nothing to laugh about with anything going on in that country at the moment. I do, however, feel compelled to laugh when I hear something as ridiculous as Mrs. Clinton's statements.

The reasons for my bitter mirth all spring from the same error, and Mrs. Clinton carries the consequences of her error in several different directions and so must my answers tend as well. I will start from the error and move towards its consequences.

The problem with her statement lies in her profound misunderstanding of the term "democracy" which she is so fond of throwing around especially in regards to the Arabs and their so-called "spring." A democracy is, as I have always been taught, direct rule by the people by majority vote, where every single person receives representation by the mere fact of their having one vote to cast and one voice to add to the discussion. (The ancient Greek philosophers characterized a democracy as the least good form of government and the closest kind of society to anarchy, but that discussion is for a different time.)

Now, I say she misunderstands democracy not necessarily because she doesn't understand the definition I gave above. Her misunderstanding is made clear in the assumptions she draws from democratic elections.

The first example of unclear thinking that she offers is that she immediately jumps to talking about the universal rights of man and how democracies and transitions to democracies must respect them, especially the rights of women snd free religious expression. Huh? I fail to find in the definition of a democracy the charge that "all democracies must respect human rights to be true democracies." Ironically, a purely democratic government is not terribly interested in human rights, it is only interested in what the majority of the people want.

This first erroneous assumption leads directly into the second, which is that the majority of people always desire what is good. This is historically provable to be untrue. An angry mob does not usually display sound judgment or moral rectitude in its actions, but hey, the mob's will is the will of the majority of its members.

Mrs. Clinton's second mistake translates very neatly into her third, which is that all democracies must conform to our American revolutionary ideas in order to be just and true. This means in effect that if a democracy emerges overseas in the Arab world and the majority of the people elect a party that is hostile to the United States' policies, that democracy is suddenly null and void.

Her thought process suddenly becomes a ridiculous oxymoron. The Egyptians can have their democracy, as long as the majority of people in said democracy elect to follow policies that conform to American ideas.

The icing on this idiotic cake is the Secretary of State's naive idea that just because the Egyptians desire free and fair elections, that they also desire a state which tolerates other religious groups besides Islam and that women will be treated fairly and justly. This is in fact a fantasy of alarming proportions. Nations governed by Sharia law have historically been at odds with Western ideals, and Egypt is no different. In fact, the elections suggest that Egyptians (at least Egyptian men) desire the establishment of Islamic law as the law of their land judging by the votes they freely and democratically cast.

Hillary Clinton in effect would give America the option of voting for its mores and its way of life, and effectively deny any other democracy the right to do the same. It is peculiar that a staunch feminist and renowned liberal like Mrs. Clinton would show such little tolerance to another, when all that she and her party will preach about is tolerance and fairness.

Henry Ford, the premiere supplier of affordable transportation back in his day, once famously said that you could have his Model T in any color, so long as it was black. The same is true with America's leadership, both the current and the previous administrations. Mrs. Clinton and the rest of us must erase from our minds the idea that freedom and democracy is something we grant to other nations as something that is uniquely American branded and conditional. To persist in such a way of thinking is not only unpatriotic, but is the allowance of a "soft" tyranny of the United States over the rest of the world.

To Russia, With Love

An Open Letter to Russia, Its People, and Its Leaders:

This past week I was able to observe the Russian parliamentary elections via the various news networks. And I have to say, the results were disgustingly predictable. The ruling party once again stayed put in power, amidst widespread reports of election rigging and fraud. The authorities have vowed to bring those responsible to justice and have so far done little to nothing, claiming that even with election fraud factored in, the ruling party still wins.

It would seem that 70 years of totalitarian oppression and the systemic bureaucratic corruption it bred do not fade easily. While the Soviet Union may have crumbled over fifteen years ago, the corruption has remained but under a different guise.

I live in a country where you hear of local election fraud only once in a while, where political dissidents do not disappear in the middle of the night, and where I am free to write and report pretty much anything I want. I will not pretend to know how frustrating and frightening it can be to live under a system that cares so little for its people.

It has therefore been to my great satisfaction to witness the courage of the people of Russia in standing up to a rotting tyranny, finally throwing up their hands and saying that they have had enough. If ever there was a people that has had enough, it must be the Russians. Utilizing all the modern tools at their disposal (social media, mobile electronics, etc.) they have become a powerful determining force in reshaping their nation hopefully for the better.

My prayer is that the Russian people will first and foremost show restraint. Your anger with your government is great and widespread, and yet it must not become violence. To become violent in protest against your government would only be to mimic the very thing you wish to change.

My next prayer is that you, the people, will understand that proper representation in government does not solve all ills, although it is an excellent place to start. Freedom is not only freedom from, but freedom for. Your society must be moving towards something, some end, and its end will greatly determine its means. Choose your goals wisely.

My third and final prayer is for the Russian leadership. Not only is violence against your own people, a people that are begging for justice, not advisable, it will never work. You must recognize not only when you have the opportunity to do good in power, but also when your time has come to leave. The needs and the wants of your people are powerful things to reckon with, and every day spent thwarting them is a day spent digging your own grave deeper. Engage with your people. Or leave.

My country and the Russian nation have of course long been at odds; I hope the day comes in my lifetime when that is no longer the case. You, the Russian people, are a beautiful and industrious people; your land is expansive and rich in abundant natural resources. Your culture is ancient and fascinating, your buildings and cities even more so.

Continue to strive for the freedom to be good, to be honest, to be prosperous, and to be generous. And to those who would stand in the way of those goals for their own personal gain, beware. You will not come to any good trying.

Be aware, Russia. And God bless you.