Last blog post

It's time for me to let the Paragraph Farm lie fallow. Hours of blogging before and after work, as well as on lunch breaks, have taken too great a toll on many other things I should be doing, such as helping my wife.

It makes no sense for me to write about theology while avoiding or giving short shrift to the full measure of Christian service that is properly mine as a husband and father. Moreover, the car accident that my daughter Jane and I were in last summer continues to affect daily life for our entire family. Jane was most traumatically injured and still suffers from often-debilitating head pain. Son Thomas's entrance into full-fledged puberty was complicated by jealousy over the attention that his little sister needed so much of and still gets. Cathleen lost a significant amount of work time while tending last summer to Jane and more recently to lingering medical and insurance paperwork, on top of all else she does to run the household.

As for me, bad habits I had even before the accident were aggravated by it. I'm ashamed to admit that I concentrated on working and blogging rather than family life because the my job and this blog were familiar and -- unlike that horrific accident and its aftermath-- controllable.

But I've come to realize that even if he's taking a sledge hammer to American foundations, what the president does matters less than whether I install window screens without help, make sure that we have adequate insurance, and guide precious children while they are still malleable.

I have faults that urgently need to be addressed, so I'm shelving this digital farm in order to address them properly. "Orthopraxis" matters as much as "orthodoxy."

If you've been a regular reader, you have my heartfelt thanks. If you were a friend, you still are. And if you pray, please pray for us. These are hard but hopeful times.

Perfect for Halloween

Pikabu, formerly the world's greatest housecat, shuffled off this mortal coil three months ago, after a happy life.

She would sometimes amuse herself by hunting birds and mice, but it was her prowess at scorpion killing when we lived in Scottsdale, AZ, that cemented her status as "senior critter" in the O'Hannigan household.

An unofficial member of the neighborhood watch in four different neighborhoods, she was black as night, blazing fast in a sprint, affectionate on her own terms, and too smart to be a Halloween prop even though she did an admirable job of acting that way more than eight years.

Speaking of All Hallows Eve, while Elizabeth Esther makes the common mistake of confusing "tracts" with "tracks," her Halloween thoughts are still worth reading, not least because she knows it's not a "Pagan Holiday"

Strange brew

Did you see Andrew Romano's recent swing at the Tea Party piñata? It was an attempt to enlighten Newsweek's rapidly-dwindling readership about the multitude of ways that the Tea Party allegedly gets the U.S. Constitution wrong, and while declaring that the Constitution should not be confused with "Holy Writ," Romano missed the point.

People like Frank Warner have already done a yeoman job of fisking Romano's essay. Warner was amused by the way that Romano accused Tea Partiers of "not sweating the details" while writing approvingly of an administration whose economic mantra seems to be "Don't bother designing a system that pays for itself; just close your eyes and borrow." Warner also pointed out that it's hard to pin labels like "authoritarian" and "delusional" on the Tea Party without noticing that "expanding the size and power of government also embraces a fundamentally authoritarian idea and imaginary benefits." Goose, gander, sauce: you know the drill.

Wanting in on the fun, Michael Tennant, writing in The New American, took Romano's mendacious critique as further proof that the Tea Party has the establishment in a panic. It need hardly be said that the establishment includes "career politicians" of both major parties.

Tennant noticed that Romano's notions of what political positions are "divisive" and "fundamentalist" are remarkably one-sided. "Under the progressive approach, which we have endured for a century now, have Americans really become more united?" Tennant wondered. "The government programs and taxes and regulations that Romano champions pit the old against the young, the rich against the poor, the black against the white, the male against the female, the corporation against the taxpayer, the employer against the employee, and so on, ad infinitum."

"Moreover," wrote Tennant, warming to his rebuttal, "it is precisely the policies that progressives favor that have brought us to the current precarious position, degrading our currency, running up insurmountable public and private debts, and creating a dependent class that will likely take to the streets — as the French and Greek dependent classes have already done — before it gives up a single penny of its ill-gotten gains." Tennant then went to his whip hand for the final furlongs: "Had constitutional originalism held sway for the last 100 years, the United States would still be on a very sound footing, as it was prior to the Progressive Era."

Between them, Warner and Tennant gave the bum's rush to Romano's thesis. To be fair, however, Romano left his thesis vulnerable to rebuttal by making some big mistakes: any argument about the U.S. Constitution that aspires to high-mindedness should not waste its first three paragraphs on an "ad feminam" attack, as Romano did by going after Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Once past that peculiar introduction, Romano flashed his condescension, and then conjured up the "religious right" as a strawman-in-waiting. By the time Romano hit his stride, he'd unwittingly announced himself as an apprentice torturer, hoping to put various fundamentalists (The aforementioned O'Donnell, plus radio talker Glenn Beck and the ever-frustrating Sarah Palin) on the rack of his imagination. It didn't work any better than touting Cass Sunstein as a "centrist" legal scholar, or pointing out that Tea Partiers are not the first to speak reverently of the Constitution, which Romano also did.

Romano made his own biases vividly clear by asserting, embarrassingly, that the Constitution is a "relentlessly secular document." Talk about a failure to communicate. While the Constitution does not -- for example -- come embroidered with the old Jesuit abbreviation "A.M.D.G," which is a Latin initialism meaning "for the greater glory of God," it's a far cry from that to the contention that the document is "relentlessly secular."

How many secular documents time-stamp their own births by noting the "Year of our Lord" in which legislators who crafted them signify assent, or assume that the gifts that liberty bestows upon a people are "blessings" rather than mere "advantages"? How is it possible to ignore the text of the Constitution while you're trying to prove that the Tea Party twists that text?

Ironically, it may be progressives (rather than originalists or Tea Party types) who treat the Constitution as though it were Holy Writ, thanks to their overweening fondness for genuflection in the direction of an endlessly-malleable (read "living") Constitution (Romano: "The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. It’s a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today...") Progressives approach the Constitution (and government generally) the way pre-Christian druids approached trees. Originalists, on the other hand, contend only that its words mean what their authors intended them to mean. In metaphorical terms, the opposing camps might be described as the shamens and the engineers-- and guess who's more likely to cloak even blatant disregard of the Constitution under the color of authority?

Having mistaken the lack of explicit references to "God" or "Jesus" for Terminator-style secularism in our federal charter, Romano then interpreted the election of Barack Obama as "a provocation" for "the forces of orthodoxy." Not for Romano the more thoughtful argument that "taxed enough already" resistance started brewing under George W. Bush, back in the halcyon days of the original "Troubled Asset Relief Program."

Hunting desperately for hypocrisy among Tea Party people and those who sympathize with them, Romano pointed out that "in the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution," including flag-descrecration and balanced-budget amendments. By his lights, "none of these revisions has anything to do with the document's original meaning." But does that mean, as Romano infers, that Bachmann and her ilk are not the originalists they think they are? Hardly, because the Constitution provides mechanisms for its own amendment. Whether Bachmann backs a losing cause is another question, though I trust her far more than I trust a politico like Harry Reid.

Romano may not be what Bugs Bunny used to call a "maroon," but as an archeologist studying the Tea Party movement with barely-concealed revulsion (NYT columnist Tom Friedman knows all about that, BTW), he manages to write like a maroon. Echoing President Obama's dismissal of "bitter clingers," Romano asserts without a scintilla of evidence that Tea Party fundamentalists "seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture."

How would Romano know this, exactly? A preponderence of "analysis" like that is what eventually gets your magazine sold for a dol -- Oh, never mind. The only scripture I know is the one that calls us to be charitable even to our enemies.

Systemic fraud?

Elsewhere in North Carolina, a Donkey Party sympathizer rigged a voting machine, maybe (is this what they mean when Get-Out-the-Vote mavens talk about a political "ground game"?):

A Craven County voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

He's not alone, and not in Nevada (whre SEIU members are up to no good). Yet some people still wonder why voter fraud is a concern across the country.

The quotable Mister O'Rourke

P.J. having fun is always incisive and frequently hilarious (the wording below is P.J. O'Rourke's but the Greek Chorus of hyperlinks comes from me):

"Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option."

Making it wail

Thanks to Orrin Judd for this find (apparently the harmonica player's name is Ted Welter):

In praise of NIMBYism, writ large

Krauthammer:

"Even as we speak, the social-democratic model Obama is openly and boldly trying to move America toward is unraveling in Europe. It's not just the real prospect of financial collapse in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, with even the relatively more stable major countries in severe distress. It is the visible moral collapse of a system that, after two generations of increasing cradle-to-grave infantilization, turns millions of citizens into the streets of France in furious and often violent protest over what? Over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62!

Having seen this display of what can only be called decadence, Obama's perfectly wired electorate says no, not us, not here. The peasants have seen the future -- Greece and France -- and concluded that it does not work. Hence their opposition to Obama's proudly transformational New Foundation agenda. Their logic is impeccable: Only the most blinkered intellectual could be attempting to introduce social democracy to America precisely when the world's foremost exemplar of that model -- Europe -- is in chaotic meltdown."

And how did you think he'd react?

Ace is too profane to quote at length, and glides right past the personality profiles that National Public Radio still does better than any other broadcast outfit, but his righteous indignation seems well-deserved:

"[Juan] Williams shouldn't be fired for making utterly noncontroversial statements about Muslims being more worrisome on airplanes than Lutherans even if he hadn't "saved" himself with the feel-goodery [...] NPR is a left-liberal's idea of "diversity" -- a taxpayer-extorted fantasyland showcasing diverse opinons all the way from the center left to the hard left."