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Monday, October 27, 2008
The Rev. Wright makes an appearance
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Well, you knew it was going to happen sooner or later. An independent GOP group is apparently going to run this ad in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. We’ll see; sometimes these groups don’t have the money they claim to have (note the fundraising appeal at the end).
It will also be interesting to see how Barack Obama reacts, if at all. In the past his campaign has been quick to hit back, but Obama now seems to be moving into the statesmanlike, heal-the-divisions phase typical of winning campaigns toward the end. Responding in kind may step on that message.
And the most important question, of course, is what it does to the polls. Does this hurt Obama, or does it end up boomeranging against McCain?
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America under President Obama: A view from the Christian Right
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group founded by Dr. James Dobson, claims to reach more than 220 million people in 155 nations, and Dobson himself is often described as the nation’s most influential evangelical leader. He is deeply involved in Republican Party politics, and his support is urgently courted by party leaders. It may not be mainstream in some ways, but it is certainly mainstream in terms of the power it wields.
Now, through their political and lobbying arm, the folks at Focus on the Family have been good enough to peer into their crystal ball to let us see what the United States is going to look like by 2012 should the American people be so foolish as to elect Barack Obama as their president.
Their description of America in another four years, contained in a “letter from the future,” is not a pretty sight. Here are a few highlights:
— By 2012, Obama has remade the U.S. Supreme Court into an activist, pro-gay institution, and as a result “the Boy Scouts no longer exist as an organization. They chose to disband rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.”
— “Tens of thousands of Christian (public school) teachers either quit or were fired, and there are hardly any evangelical teachers in public school any more… In addition, many private Christian schools decided to shut down after the Supreme Court ruled that anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation extended to private institutions such as schools.”
— “There are no more Roman Catholic or evangelical Protestant adoption agencies,” and Christian parents are being refused the right to adopt by secular adoption agencies because they have “”narrow’ or dangerous views on religion or homosexuality.”
— “The Bible can no longer be freely preached over radio or television stations when the subject matter includes such ‘offensive’ doctrines as criticizing homosexual behavior.” In addition, “churches have no freedom to refuse to allow their buildings to be used for wedding ceremonies for homosexual couples.” and “homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service.”
— Christian nurses, physicians, family counselors, lawyers and other professionals are being stripped of their right to work in those fields, and because homeschooling is now all but outlawed, thousands of homeschooling parents are moving their families to Australia or New Zealand.
— The U.S. Supreme Court has “nullified all Federal Communications Commission restrictions on obscene speech or visual content in radio and television broadcasts. As a result, television programs at all hours of the day contain explicit portrayals of sexual acts.”
— After President Obama pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq, “Al Qaida operatives from Syria and Iran poured into Iraq and completely overwhelmed the Iraqi security forces,” followed by mass executions. “The number put to death may soon reach the millions.”
— Four U.S. cities have been hit by terror attacks, and “in mid-2010, Iran launched a nuclear bomb that exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv… President Obama said he abhorred what Iran had done, and he hoped the U.N. would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity.”
— Russia has invaded and captured Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria “with no military response from the U.S. or the U.N.” Instead, President Obama moved to strengthen US ties with communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.
— Health care has been nationalized, and “the waiting list for prostate cancer surgery is 3 years.” In fact, “people older than 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their ‘duty’ is increasingly thought to be to go home to die….”
— “Conservative talk radio, for all intents and purposes, was shut down by the end of 2010,” and evangelical Christian book publishers have been barred from selling their products through Amazon, Borders and Barnes and Noble. And dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail.
“When did all this start?” the folks at Focus on the Family ask, looking back at us in hindsight from 2012. “Christians share a lot of the blame. In 2008, many evangelicals thought Senator Obama was an opportunity for ‘change’ and they voted for him…. Many people thought he sounded so thoughtful, so reasonable.” Instead, the letter claims, by 2012 Obama had moved to repress all dissent to the point that “hardly any brave citizen dares to resist the new government policies any more.”
This is what millions of our fellow Americans are being told to believe by leaders in whom they place great faith and confidence. This is why you can sense a rising tide of panic from some quarters as it begins to sink in that Barack Obama is likely to become our next president. It is vile, irresponsible and unbelievable fantasy, but to many it is revealed truth. And it is difficult to imagine how that world view can ever be reconciled with that of the mainstream.
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Greenspan concedes a basic ‘flaw’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Whatever else you might say about the man, Alan Greenspan took his punishment like a grown-up.
Appearing before the House Oversight Committee last week, the former Federal Reserve chairman acknowledged that the anti-regulatory, hyper-free-market ideology that had served him well for 40 years —- a philosophy that he literally learned at Ayn Rand’s knee —- had in some ways been wrong.
And not just slightly wrong. The economic crisis has revealed a flaw, he said, “a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”
Greenspan did not come easily to that confession, but the fact he came to it at all speaks well of his intellectual honesty. As a young man, Greenspan had been a member of Rand’s inner circle, absorbing her claims that altruism was evil, that taxes should be voluntary, that mankind had no responsibility to others and that “each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self interests.”
“I am opposed to all forms of control,” Rand proclaimed. “I am for an absolute laissez-faire free unregulated economy. I am for separation of state and economics.”
The young Greenspan lapped up talk like that. In a letter in 1957 to the New York Times, he defended Rand’s philosophy. “Justice is unrelenting,” he wrote. “Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
Time and experience eventually softened the harsh edges of that belief for Greenspan, but he never wavered in his opposition to regulation or in his belief that individuals, left free to selfishly pursue their own self-interests, would generate wealth and make markets self-correcting without the heavy hand of government.
That’s the part he got partially wrong, he said last week.
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself especially, are in a state of shock and disbelief,” he told the committee.
While Rand’s “objectivism,” as she called her philosophy, never attained the wide appeal she sought, many of its tenets and language have been absorbed into modern conservative economic theory. And Greenspan is far from alone in acknowledging that it has not held up well in current circumstances. As a result, issues long regarded as settled in American politics are about to be reopened.
“Over the past year, some of the critical pillars underlying market competition arguably have failed,” Greenspan admitted in a speech earlier this month at Georgetown University. “A worldwide debate on the future of globalization and capitalism is being intensified by the current crisis. Its resolution will define the world marketplace and the way we live for decades to come.”
That’s a potentially dangerous undertaking. In his Georgetown speech, Greenspan correctly defended the core importance of property rights, economic liberty and capitalism. As he noted, those concepts have proved essential to economic progress and should not be abandoned.
However, as he also noted, the only way to sustain political support for a capitalist system “is to continue to support market incentives that create jobs and to find productive ways to ease the pain of job losers.” He also took note of “the recent growing inequality of income,” a new problem that “requires insight into its roots, and policy action where appropriate.”
Ayn Rand, in other words, would not be pleased with her disciple. She liked to claim that her philosophy was based on hard-headed realism, the notion “that reality exists as an objective absolute.”
Well, the “objective absolute” that is reality has tested her philosophy and found it faulty, a ship of illusions that ran aground on the shoals of experience. The challenge for the next president and Congress will be to correct our course without steering us too far in the other direction.
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