Posted 6:41 PM by Hill
It's, like, 'way too soon to tell. We won't actually know for at least a year, although since he seems determined to hit the ground running, by six months in office there may be some solid indications. We elected a Democrat (who is, almost by definition an internationalist*) who has charisma - I suppose it goes without saying that all successful presidential candidates have a certain amount of this, but our President-elect has enough to be able to get elected without having answered even one tough question from anybody that made it into a news report.
The one tough question that was asked and that got even a little press coverage he demurred on answering, saying that decision was "above my pay grade". So this guy has some genuine charisma - either that, or he's the kind of guy who may have missed his calling; in that he should be selling ice cubes to Eskimos or sun lamps to Arabs.
It may be that he will prove to be a very good President and that under his tutelage we will be more prosperous, more united, more aware of our proper role in the world, and even safer than we are at the moment. Among a couple of hundred million other voters, I certainly hope and pray (and I mean that last one literally) this will come to pass. Perhaps I am too cynical; that tends to come with age and I'm old. However, I do think that it's wise to be cautious about a politician that I still don't trust (a politician who names two lifelong Communists as his mentors) and who states in his book that he hobnobbed only with people who would not make him look like a sellout - including Marxist professors - is, IMHO at least a bit suspicious.
Put that down to innate skepticism, though. I do intend to wait and see what's going to happen before venturing a further opinion (not, you understand, that there is a viable alternative). It may be that my suyspicions are so totally unfounded that I will have to take them back publicly, and believe it or not, I actually look forward to doing just that.
Meanwhile, we all have to deal with the result of the greed of some people who have the ethics of a wharf rat. Once we have done that, there is the Congress to be seen to. It goes without saying that Congress could have stopped this slide into oblivion that has cost 3.2 million jobs, but they didn't.
The motives of politicians will never be clear. They are subject to all the same temptations as the rest of us, and while they aren't more likely to give in to those temptations than we are, they are more likely to be offered more powerful inducements than the rest of us for giving in to them. It's never surprising to find that a politician has become corrupt. Remember the old joke - "How did you know the senator was lying, Mrs. Johnson?" "His lips were moving." On the other hand, it is a surprise to find that a politician has consistently resisted the aforementioned temptations.
It isn't likely that the President-elect will succumb to such temptations. He may be so busy running thing that he won't have time to consider selling out, which I don't believe he would do at any rate. Liberals and socialists (both of which words may describe President-elect Obama) are essentially idealists. They all seem to feel that if we just sat down and talked it over we could settle almost all our differences. I can't be the only conservative who has fervently wished that this were true. I think the strain on the President-elect may be more in the area of reconciling his ideals with the political realities of running the most powerful country in the world. I don't believe there is a chance in hell of doing that, and I think this may consistently be his greatest challenge.
If he overcomes it he may make a very good President, but if this happens, he may emerge from the experience as something quite different from what he was when his term began. In concert with my statements above, I intend to wait and see what happens.
Mr. President-elect, may the Lord bless you and keep you; may the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you, and give you peace.

*the principle of cooperation among nations, for the promotion of their common good, sometimes as contrasted with nationalism, or devotion to the interests of a particular nation. To be contrasted with the Labor and Socialist International of 1923, which I don't believe the President-elect subscribes to.

Labels: Inauguration and Fugue in D Minor

Posted 8:36 PM by Hill
Quo Vadis, President Carter?
I confess to being a fan of former President Jimmy Carter. He has made some significant differences in my life. He is the first identifiably Christian President to serve during my lifetime. He is the person whose example convinced me to become involved with Habitat for Humanity while I lived in another Texas city. I was super impressed with the way he got Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin to agree on something that I never thought Arabs would agree on - the continued existence of Israel. President Carter has written a piece for the Washington Post which you can find at this link.
Mr. Carter says that the U.S. and its supposed new direction in foreign policy is troubling, but he has, as far as I can see, so far managed to understand only one side of the story. Only my love for this fine and upright man prevents me from treating him more harshly here. Mr. Carter has managed either to misunderstand or to misconstrue almost everything that President Bush has so far managed to to accomplish in the area of at least attempting to ensure that the country is safe from further attacks by Moslem extremists. Mr. Carter points out that the U.S. was formerly "admired almost universally as the preeminent champion of human rights", but lately has "become the foremost target of respected international organizations concerned about these basic principles of democratic life". While he is correct about the fact that the U.S. was once a paragon of human rights and a beacon to the world, we have not held that position for many years - at least two decades. And the "respected international organizations" he refers to are organizations like Amnesty International, which has a firmly stated goal fo abolishing capital punishment in the world, and which manages to garner financial support from countries like Russia and China by attacking the U.S. in this area. In the past, this organization has shown that it has interlinked contacts with other "rights" organizations such as Greenpeace and the lunatic fringe Earth First! and The Animal Liberation Front.
But I digress. Mr. Carter then goes on to say that the U.S. has detained its own citizens as enemy combatants without charging them with a crime or allowing them access to legal counsel. This is true. Nevertheless, if you are a U.S. citizen and are taken prisoner in combat while in the service of a foreign power, you can have your citizenship stripped from you, and you can also be prosecuted for treason. Perhaps this is a reason to watch these individuals more closely. If you are likely to be tried for treason, you are certainly a flight risk, and so far the only one tried in Federal court was not only allowed access to counsel, he was allowed full access to the U.S. legal system, so Mr. Carter's concerns seem a bit premature. He also notes that hundres of Taliban fighters who are not Afghans are being held under similar circumstances at our naval base in Cuba. The U.S. government has no duty under international law to provide these individuals with access to lawyers or very much of anything else. They may legally be held until the conflict is over, which may be ten or twenty years from now. Mr. Carter may not like it, and it certainly goes against the grain for America to do such a thing, but please remember that these people are perfectly unrepentant. They are all determined to go back to fighting us as soon as they are released, and the U.S. is under no obligation to allow them to do so. Additionally, it is not true, as Mr. Carter asserts, that these actions are comparable to those by despots the U.S. has opposed over the years. Let's start with the fact that despots liek Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro do not require that a person actually attack their government in order to merit this treatment. It's only necessary to get in the way of the despot sufficiently to be noticed. Oh - and almost every one of the people so treated by Hussein and Castro was a citizen of their country, not a soldier opposing them.
Mr. Carter also states that there is currently no danger from Iraq and that it is necessary for a country to do tests of its nuclear devices in order to be able to later produce them and use them. This was probably true when he was President, but Mr. Carter may not realize that those tests may now be simulated using computers. He also says that there is an urgent need for the UN to enforce unrestricted inspections in Iraq. This is probably true, but unrestricted inspections will not be allowed in Iraq. That's why Mr. Hussein kicked out the inspectors who wer already present in Iraq. He didn't want unrestricted inspections. He also says that the U.S. has abandoned any sponsorship of substantivenegotiations between Israel and the Palestinians when there have never been any substantive negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israelis have negotiated ardently with them, as with other governments, but the Palestinians have never given in on a single point. They don’t really want to negotiate. They want to kill Jews. On this point, it is difficult to understand why Mr. Carter doesn't see the point. The entire history of Isrel and the "Palestinians" is that they have never negotiated anything meaningful between them, primarily because Yasser Arafat has never allowed any real negotiations. Israel is in the positon of trying to fight terrorism in its midst while simultaneously protecting the civil rights of the "Palestinians", many of whom are Israeli citizens.
Mr. Carter's final statement is telling: "It is crucial that the historical and well-founded American commitments prevail: to peace, justice, human rights, the environment and international cooperation." Personally, I think that the former President's stated wish will come to pass, and in fact I feel that it has never really strayed far from those ideals he espouses. Everything he says in his article begs the question - what are we to do in the face of an entier population of individuals whose most fervent desire is to annihilate us and our entire way of life, including the America-bashing countries and politicians of Europe. Mr. Carter offers many complaints, but no real solutions. If he wants foreign policy or military deployments to change, why doesn't he offer an alternative to what is being done - that is, an alternative that does not invite genocidal attack from Moslem extremists. I mean, we always have the option to simply spread our figurative legs and wait to see what happens. Fortunately most Americans are not suicidal, and neither, I think, is Mr. Carter. As I’ve said before, what we really need is another Charles Martel to defend us. If you’ve read the article about more personal attacks from al-Qaida possibly happening at some point (like drive-by shootings and hostage executions, for instance), perhaps you will understand a little better what we are up against. These guys don’t have political demands to make. They want us dead. All of us. As soon as they can arrange it. If we are to prevent them from killing us all, then we have to devise strategies that will accomplish that and still leave us with our self-respect. It’s a tough call. I’ve never been gladder that I wasn’t President than I am at the moment.

Posted 9:54 PM by Hill
What is a Logical Response to the Terrorist Threat?

Terrorism it seems, has assumed a life of its own in the U.S. We have all seen how devastating terrorists can be to us and our way of life, but we don't really know what to do about it. It's sort of like the problem of world hunger or the millions of orphans who are present among us. I have spoken with several folks who upon realizing the enormity of the attack on us, did things that in an ordinary world would be considered insane - or at the very least heavily compulsive. One man cleaned all his firearms; a woman called everyone she knew on a daily basis, even though she knew they were not in danger. I collected together all my survival supplies, called all my children and E-mailed all my other relatives. It was almost as though I felt that my family would have to live on what we had stored at the moment until the country came to its senses (which, by the way, does not seem to have happened as yet), or perhaps we would have to travel to a far country where things like matches and permanent dwellings were not known. It's very difficult to know what to do when your nation is attacked. There must have been similar feelings in the minds of those who were around when Peral Harbor was attacked so long ago. It seems long ago to me because I would not be born for almost two years after the attack.
There is a feeling of violation that transcends most other feelings and which drives lesser matters from the mind. The feeling and its confusing and frustrating aspects are still very perceptible to me. I can recapture them all involuntarily by simply watching video of the events in New York and Washington. There is not really any separation or distance that forces the reactions to the background. I can remember feeling this way about the death of my father for twenty years following the day we buried him. Anything that brought him to mind would bring along with it a sense of loss and langorous mourning for the past, which was never to be recovered. Perhaps Thomas Wolfe was right - you can't go home again. There have been other situations in my life that have evoked the same sort of response from me and which seemed as hopelessly closed off as that one does. Neverhteless, what happened last September is of a different kind - when an event like that occurs, there are hundreds of millions of people who feel something akin to what you feel. It isn't just that we haven't been attacked on our own soil since 1814; it's that we felt invulnerable and untouchable (apparently primarily because of our overweening arrogance). What happened crushed that attitude so completely that it may never regrow again.
One of the things that has been most obvious is that God has been the subject of increased scrutiny from Americans. In my opinion, this can only be good. Any time the public decides that God is important enough to stop consuming, driving to work, fornicating and creating wealth for themselves and their posterity to consider the role that God should have in their lives, this is a good thing. The mode of transfer for this increased notice was abrupt, and I have discovered a review about a PBS program I didn't watch - mainly becuase I wasn't aware of it - whose title is Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero. This article, which gives a half-hearted review of a PBS examinaiton of the idea that God may have failed us on September eleventh, is something to behold. Since I didn't see the actual program, I can only judge from the review, which offers no hope at all. There are the predictable post-modern questions asked by the PBS documentary - Does God exist; If He exists, then why did He permit this to happen; why did so many courageous young firefighters and police officers lose their lives in the attack? Why were so many families left without visible means of support because the father was killed in the attack. Those with the post-modern view won't believe fervently in God unless He reduces himself to an observable phenomenon. They conclude that He either could not prevent the attack, or that He chose not to prevent it. This is much the same problem faced by religious Jews following Word War II. If you accept that God controls everything, then you must accept that the holocaust was in His will. Many, many Jews simply could not accept this idea. They either rejected God entirely or concluded that He is is irrelevant.
PBS's conclusion is predictable; they raise questions, but avoid answering them because the answers disturb the prevailing attitude toward God. They fail utterly to find a path through the doubts and find anything substantive at all. One of the things contained in the review is a comment from a minister in my own denomination - the Episcopal Church - who says that faced with the need to harden ourselves and accept the difficult truth of the attack, it has been hard to open up to God at all. : "We're sensitive to the changes around us, but we know we have to survive and [we] have numbed ourselves, hardened ourselves. To be vulnerable is very difficult right now. And to be open to faith takes vulnerability and some people aren't willing to do that." This is simple dissemulation. Christians grow closer to God in difficult times because He helps them live through the travail. Those who do not grow closer to Him during difficult times often find that they feel even more alienated than non-Christians in the same situation. There are those among us, who have recently been identified as "Tranzis", or Transnational Progressives, who see an occurrence like the September 11th attacks as wasteful and senseless; it solves no problems, it feeds no poor people, and it does not serve the common good as they conceive it to be.
So how should we react to the attacks? Here's a list of suggested reactions, in no particular order.
We should mourn the loss of lives in the attacks.
We should pray for those who work to make us safe.
We should feel anger focused on the terrorists and those who support them in any way.
We should want to end the conflict by destroying the terrorists.
We should support those in charge at the local, state and national levels who are working to overcome the almost unbelievable difficulties and protect us.
We should suport those in uniform who fight and otherwise serve our country
During the anniversary observances, we should weep with sorrow and ask God to save us from the Evil One.
We should go to our beds every night believing that our government and our God will protect us.
We should all remember that as Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be watered occasionally by the blood of patriots. It is its natural manure."
We should keep our chins up and work toward a safer nation and a richer future for all Americans. We should also remember that The President of the United States has asked all Americans to give service to the nation during the month of September.

May the Lord Bless you all and hold you in the palm of His hand.

Posted 5:46 PM by Hill
Do we have the high ground - and does it matter?

There is little that hasn't been said about the situation vis-a-vis Iraq. The Vice President seems to want to attack them this week. The President seems convinced that an attack should be made, but (probably because he is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces) won't give details. The Europeans appear to be opposed to an attack on Iraq because of various reasons, or at least various reasons are stated for their reluctance. Most of the reasons seems to boil down to a combination of a stated distaste for unprovoked attack and an unstated, but fervent desire to gig America wherever possible. There are many problems inherent in any unprovoked attack we might make on Iraq, which is not to say that Iraq doesn't need a change of leaders. That seems to be the subject of widespread agreement in the West. All Moslem nations seem to be united in the opinion that attacking Iraq would cause the entire region to erupt in war. Hmmm. There does seem to be quite a bit of self-serving rhetoric floating about in the air. What are the facts of the case? In a statement by Dr. Joseph Kostiner at a conference on Islamic fundamentalism, we learn,
"Terrorism is the violent manifestation of a frustration that modernity induces in Islamic groupings. Organizations that employ terror inveigh against the existing social order and attempt to annihilate it completely. Most Islamic thinkers have not reached such extreme conclusions but a few are very vocal. There are two main streams of Islamic terrorism prevalent: one is the Iranian Shii stream inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini which is practiced by the Hizbollah in Lebanon at the behest of its leader Fadlallah. The other is the Sunni stream inspired by Sayyid Qutb and is observed in Egypt and Gaza etc." Given such a bent, there seems little doubt that we have a cultural/religious conflict on our hands. This may take awhile to communicate to the American public, since such a conflict here would be viewed as aberrant and almost insane. To Moslem fundamentalists, however, who have sanctified death and who worship a god whose peophet exhorts them to kill unbelievers, a conflict involving the deaths of thousands, or millions of unbelievers as well as the suicides of some Moslems who were selloing their lives at the highest possible price would be perfectly logical. It's sort of the mirror image of making the world safe for democracy. Should we attack Iraq? Almost certainly, since Saddam Hussein would not hesitate to sell any weapons of mass destruction he had on hand to a group that intended to use them against Americans. Do we have the moral high ground? No. Mr. Hussein has not attacked us, and we are not directly threatened by his government. Such an attack would not fit into the concept of the "just war" as first outlined by St. Augustine. Should we attack Iraq anyway? Maybe. How afraid are we that he will directly or indirectly attack us later on? How many American and/or European lives could be saved if we attacked? Would an attack encourage Hussein to use whatever weapons of mass destruction he already has against us and Israel? There are enough imponderables in this conflict and potential conflict to make your head spin, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that, based on the quote above and many like it over the past eleven months, we may very wellbe in the kind of war that will mean the survival or demise of western civilization. This has happened before - more than once. It happened in the fifth century when Atilla's hordes crossed first Asia, then Europe like a scythe. They were stopped at the battle of Chalons in 451. The next time was in 732 when the Moroccans crossed the pyrenees and attacked France. They were crushed, not to say nearly destroyed by Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers in 732. The Turks invaded Europe in 1375 and the last bastion of Christianity, Constantinople, fell to them in 1453. Spain was reclaimed by Fernando in 1492 and the Turks were driven out of eastern Europe in 1589. Since then, the West has been safe from Moslem invasion. For those who do not see how a Moslem invasion could be worse than the government they already have, the process is this; once Moslems have control of an area where Christianity is the prevailing religion, the men are almost all killed. Some who are intelligent and/or strong, as well as young, are castrated to make them docile and converted into slaves. All the women and children are enslaved . Any among the populace who convert to Islam are left alone, but are still stripped of all property, and many become beggars. Another Moslem invasion would be right along these lines. Should we attack Iraq? Perhaps not, but we SHOULD keep our powder dry, because there are millions in the U.S. who will not believe that Moslems are capable of treating a conquered populace as described above until they see the evidence on the evening news. Unfortunately, the massacre of the Armenian Christians by the Turks was in 1915, and the only people who actually remember this event were children at the time. By the time Americans are convinced that there is real danger from Moslems and that they intend us no good whatsoever, it may be too late to do anything substantive about it. Make no mistake; we are facing another threat to western civilization just as real as that faced in the Balkans in 1375 and in France in 732. Those who are running this terrorist "army" are determined to destroy the west and everything it stands for. They are equally determined to replace it with an eighth-century hereditary caliphate run by Moslems.

Posted 10:10 AM by Hill
http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/

Posted 8:53 PM by Hill
Making Headway Downward

There is unease here. It may be the time of day, the milieu, or it may just be my own paranoia. Everyone has paranoia these days. Things are so out of joint that we all pretend to go about our business and see nothing wrong. It’s like the elephant in the parlor, though. We all see it, but none of us will discuss it – at least, not very often. It’s September eleventh. We all saw it, we all went through it together, and now it’s frightened us out of our comfortable places. In fact, it may be more serious than that. It may be that there are no longer any comfortable places. We are beset by uncertainty and fear, even though the fear is a small, nameless and ill-considered fear. It’s difficult to feel much fear when the danger is so far away. It’s still at least as far away as the Post Office. Now the enemy, whoever they are, is threatening more accessible targets. It may be that the enemy has taken aim at our personal real estate as well. If the enemy has noticed us, then we may be dead meat. In other news, the Moroccans may have designs on Europe again. Some of them showed up in Rome, armed, so says the report with a gardening chemical that happens to be a cyanide compound. The Italian police confiscated the material, which when used by the enemy would have been enough to kill about 650 people, if the terrorists could have convinced each of the victims to eat seven grams of it. This would be on the order of a teaspoonful or so. Probably easier than sending a whole army, with the attendant supply, discipline and language problems. Nevertheless, unless the Moroccans have suddenly dropped thirty points off the average IQ in the country, there should be some deadlier ways to kill large numbers of people than talking them into eating seven grams of moderately toxic fertilizer additive.
Pakistan, having discovered that it couldn’t resist helping the U.S. against Afghanistan’s late and unlamented Taliban government, now wants America to puts its large and sometimes ill-guided foot into the problem with India. As if! Nobody playing with a full deck could believe that the U.S. isn’t already trying to lower everyone’s blood pressure along the shared border. Since neither country has said they will not use nukes if a war starts, they might both be determined enough to do it. Duck and cover. Good thing the enemy doesn’t have nukes, or the U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be toast, along with a few hundred thousand Afghans.
That’s one of the presenting problems here. These guys working for the enemy would have gladly sacrificed some Afghans (what the hell, they’re only Afghans – we’re the important ones). They would sacrifice themselves into the bargain, if they could kill Americans or other westerners. That’s sort of the marker that makes this situation different from situations in the past. The enemy has thousands of young men who are willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to murder the residents of a western country.
While the typical westerner thinks of war as something that is distasteful, violent, sweaty and done only as the last resort to keep from being overrun by an aggressor nation, the enemy thinks of war as something more or less coldly calculated and executed in the full knowledge that one will not survive it, but one’s ideals will. In addition, the war envisioned by these individuals employed by the enemy is something to be conducted in the lap of the west, where the women and children reside. This makes the enemy’s concept of war unique – it is planned in cold blood, executed by those who realize that their actions constitute suicide and whose only interest is either to destroy property or lives, preferably both, in the attempt. This is enough to think about right now. Don’t forget it; you’re going to need to remember it later.