Mutual misreading

Noemie Emery offers a compelling interpretation of the president's falling popularity among erstwhile supporters.

Her piece complements this one from Jay Cost about the interplay between the president's ego and his political instincts.

Super slo-mo has a very bad day

General McChrystal's request for reinforcements in Afghanistan has been back-burnered, and so have polite requests for specificity on one of the bigger domestic issues before Congress.

Might those be examples of what happens when "We're going to win" is a phrase used about competiton with Rio de Janeiro in bids for the Olympics, rather than about wars with the Taliban overseas?

A nice remembrance

Monica Crowley remembers writer William Safire.

Framing or reframing the health care debate

No way will Ann Coulter be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, although the ever-confident blonde conservative of razorlike wit has suggested that her ongoing series of columns on "Liberal Lies About National Healthcare" deserves the nomination that it won't get. You might say she has the audacity of hope (hers makes more sense than you-know-who's). And why not?

Coulter can still serve up a bon mot as well as anyone else writing today. Certainly it's not always a mot juste or -- heavens to murgatroid -- a beau geste, but her verve is a thing to behold:

According to a 1997 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the homicide rate with firearms alone was 16 times higher in the U.S. than in 25 other industrialized countries combined.

That will tend to reduce the U.S.'s "life expectancy" numbers, while telling us absolutely nothing about the country's medical care. (I promise that if you make it to a hospital alive, you are more likely to survive a gunshot wound in the U.S. than any place else in the world.)

It's comparing apples and oranges to talk about life expectancy as if it tracks with a country's health care system. What matters is the survival rate from the same starting line, to wit, the same medical condition. Not surprisingly, in the apples-to-apples comparisons, the U.S. medical system crushes the welfare-state countries.

A little Coulter goes a long way, so when you want more measured arguments, it's best to follow the sage (ha!) advice of the Western Confucian, who points to an essay from Dr. Doug Iliff, M.D., on "The Ten Most Important Questions to Ask About Health Care in America."

Economics looms large in those questions, but it's not alone.

I should link the Western Confucian, Joshua Snyder, more than I do. He finds interesting things from his perch in Korea and has good taste in music. Then there's this, from the bio on his blog: "He [the self-described Western Confucian] sees Confucianism, condemned as "reactionary" during the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as a political philosophy that has many cognates with both American Paleoconservatism and Paleolibertarianism, in that its twin pillars, Li (Etiquette) and Jen (Benevolence), posit reverence of tradition, ritual, and antiquity on the one hand and governance by moral example rather than force on the other."

How's that working out for ya?

Sticking it to Dr. Phil, because he deserved that (hat tip to Foxfier at Head Noises for the find).

Meanwhile, the president is up to his all-too-usual nefariousness (and I do not mean to suggest that there's anything wrong with pitching Chicago as an Olympics venue on a junket to Denmark -- nothing wrong with that at all; it's what presidents do, although usually by deputizing such tasks to their secretaries of state. But presidents should also have a modicum of respect for U.S. military veterans, not to mention the "loyal opposition" willing to fact-check their statements).

Methinks the Washington Times is right

The "leader of the free world" torch passed from the United States to Israel this week, they say. And they have ample grounds for such belief. The first two paragraphs of their compelling case:

Israel is looking like the new leader of the Free World. The previous leader, the United States, resigned this role last week at the United Nations to take the position of global community organizer. This was made plain by President Obama in his speech, titled "Responsibility for Our Common Future," in which he heralded "a new chapter of international cooperation." By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a blunt and forceful call to action in the central challenge facing free people today. This is the struggle of "civilization against barbarism" being fought by "those who sanctify life against those who glorify death."

Mr. Obama's address was the predictable mix of criticism of the past policies of the United States, self-praise for correcting said policies and vague calls to united action on matters of collective interest. It sought to ingratiate rather than offend. But Mr. Netanyahu chastised the United Nations for its "systematic assault on the truth." He spoke truths that Mr. Obama would never whisper regarding the regime in Iran, which is "fueled by an extreme fundamentalism" and an "unforgiving creed." Mr. Netanyahu rebuked those members who countenanced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's diatribe before the same world body, rightly calling it a "disgrace."

Postscript: Nice Deb agrees with me.

And see also this column from Jim Hoagland (and this one from India) about the unintended consequences of this American administration's fondness for trying to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Friend Kurt puts the matter well: "Would somebody please give young Barack a happy face for that "No Nukes" term paper he wrote his sophomore year?" (ha! don't get me started on his writing)

A vocabulary warning from the philosopher

Plato?

Aristotle?

Socrates?

Vizzini?

Nope.

It's Anthony Esolen:

We should, I think, beware of using the language of the enemy; and the enemy has been bandying that word "choice" about, while political partisans clear across the field assume, without thinking too deeply about it, that choice is an unalloyed good. This they assume, while ignoring the fact that the best and sweetest things in human life, by their very nature, cannot be chosen, or are at least not principally objects of choice; we can assent to them when they come, graciously accepting the gift. Joseph Pieper once wrote, "In the beginning there is always a gift." We are quickly replacing that wisdom with the dreary reflex of a postindustrial culture -- or whatever it is we have now, which goes by the name of "culture" even though it elicits from us no piety, no loyalty, and no memory. We are replacing it with the wisdom of the Chooser below: "In the beginning there is an act of autonomous will."

An inspiration for Giovanni Guareschi?

The more I read about Francesco Forgione (Padre Pio) -- whose feast day was yesterday -- the more I'm reminded of Giovanni Guareschi's great and chronically underrated "Little World of Don Camillo" books, which were first published in the early Fifties (Padre Pio died in 1968).

At one of the links above, friend Julie quotes from a summary of Padre Pio's life that describes him as the first priest ever to be blessed with the stigmata (a collective name for the wounds of Jesus as they have occasionally been made manifest in the bodies of other people through the centuries).

If you think the way I do, you may have read that and said to yourself, "Wait...Francis of Assisi was also (perhaps) a stigmatist." That is true, but the Padre Pio detail nevertheless gets it right, because, unlike Pio (wonderful in his own right, and still working with enthusiasm for the kingdom of God, because he said "after my death I will do more"), the incontestably great Francis of Assisi was never a priest.

Simplifying the water wars

Mr. Bill Kammerer has a gift for this sort of thing:

In a free society, when it comes to a choice between people and a fish, people come out on top. Then they eat the fish.

On Goldilocks and speaking truth to power

Sister Toldjah hails a new essay by veteran political columnist Michael Barone, and rightly so. Barone summarizes his main point in one trenchant sentence: "I would submit that the president's call for an end to 'bickering' and the charges of racism by some of his supporters are the natural reflex of people who are not used to hearing people disagree with them and who are determined to shut them up."

The people not used to hearing disagreement are people weaned on politically correct codes of speech at major universities, Barone notes wryly. He also explains the often-overlooked irony of the current scene: "Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned us that there's a danger that intense rhetoric can provoke violence, and no decent person wants to see harm come to our president or other leaders. But it's interesting that the two most violent incidents at this summer's town hall meetings came when a union thug beat up a 65-year-old black conservative in Missouri and when a liberal protester bit off part of a man's finger in California."

Those two violent incidents tend to be ignored or dismissed by people who haven't got rhetorical skill enough to cherry-pick events that support their own positions, but evidence to back up what Barone asserts can be found even outside the Beltway, as my friend Brigette well knows. Brigette wrote a column explaining why conservatives (meaning, in this context, people opposed to President Obama) do not deserve to be tarred with the broad brush of racism. Her column was spiked by an editor who thought Brigette's carefully-reasoned analysis might be too incendiary for the more excitable readers of the New Mexico Independent, where Brigette is a regular contributor.

Not being a resident of Santa Fe myself, I can't speak to the accuracy of the timid editor's perception, but I do know that Brigette takes undeserved heat for expressing conservative views, even though her tone is typically irenic.

Unfortunately for Brigette (and to a lesser extent, for me also), high-mindedness seldom helps when you take positions that are at odds with prevailing or preferred narratives.

Certain progressives with whom I am friendly have banned my Facebook feed because, I'm told, they don't want to be "exposed" to the conservative political views that I sometimes voice or link to on that forum. The funny thing is that I'm hardly peddling toxins, and I suspect that those who fear exposure to my conservative thought would in almost any other context be singing the praises of open-mindedness.

Brigette's experience, in other words, is par for the course when you buck "Hope and Change." Otherwise level-headed people insist on finding alleged (and inevitably racist) subtexts in the opposition to our president, apparently because deconstruction as a scorched-earth tool of literary analysis has made so many inroads into popular culture that they get more of a charge from hunting imaginary subtexts than from taking statements at face value. Like the increasingly malicious Jimmy Carter, they misread opposition to Obama in precisely the way that the philosopher Nietzsche would have misread it: as a velvet glove that barely conceals an iron will to power.

Recite a partial catalog of presidential missteps that includes abandoning Polish commitments, ignoring the Honduran constitution, sandbagging American commanders, placing want ads for the next Leni Riefenstahl on the public dime, encouraging federal takeover of one-sixth of the American economy, etc., and some Obama fans will still ask why you really don't care for the guy in the Oval Office. Not long ago, former Vermont governor Howard Dean got a pass from this crowd for quitting his church over a bike path dispute, but they only extend passes to other progressives. Conservatives must tread lightly, or be charged by the likes of Maureen Dowd with saying things they did not actually say.

The town hall phenomenon and the September 12 March on Washington have not helped the progressive mood. Because President Obama's most fervid supporters are genuinely worried about what too many of them consider orchestrated attempts to "turn an all-white group of angry haters into a rainbow," it does little good to remind such people that oppositon to Team Obama is not "astroturfed" and not lily-white. Recalling Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, celebrated dictum about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, or pointing out that Hillary Clinton's high-handed attempt to reform healthcare behind closed doors was also stiff-armed a generation ago, does no good either, because -- as Bill Whittle of "Pajamas Media" made a point of explaining -- it doesn't fit the prevailing narrative.

Sadly, the prevailing narrative slanders anyone who has the temerity to oppose the president. It turns out that we were misled by the left's neo-Clintonian parsing of the verb "is." Dissent is only the highest form of patriotism when the right people say so. If they disagree with dissent, or do not publicly subscribe to it, then dissent devolves into thoughtcrime.

Many progressives instinctively grasp that their side has a "Goldilocks" problem: historical opposition to federal overreach is a messy fact that has to be hand-trimmed to fit a frame that is big enough to encompass the Civil War and Jim Crow laws, but no bigger. Too much context is -- for progressives-- a dangerous thing.

What I mean is this: Anyone who points out that questions about the role of the federal government divided Hamiltonians from Jeffersonians in the 18th century (long before Obama came along) merely gives Goldilocks an excuse to complain about how this chair is too small (The objection goes something like, "Times have changed-- don't bother me with Thomas Jefferson!").

So trying to use American history as a corrective for postmodern myopia is out: they have no time for that. But anyone who puts history on the shelf to wonder with a nod toward current events why Democrats scrambled to patch holes in proposed legislation that would not have needed patching if the president had been telling the truth about health care reform and illegal aliens gets dismissed with "this chair is too big."

In the minds of the most vocal Obama supporters -- those who don't even show up to debate , as at least one of them admits -- the only chair that fits Goldilocks just right is the one that says "I won."

Passive-agressive behavior is the order of the day, because progressives forget that the chair belongs not to Goldilocks, but to the three bears. Anguished calls from ranking Democrats for civility in discourse are accompanied by screeds that impute the basest possible motives to those with whom they disagree. Lessons from the American founders are declared out of bounds, and so are arguments based on the anything the Congressional Budget Office said in the last six months. Opposition to federal overreach must in their reading be forever tainted with support for the Confederacy or segregation. On recognizing that alloy, Obama partisans reach for the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension of the kind their standard bearer and his teleprompter can't help but employ. With the rhetorical rules rewriten to their own advantage, they can then declaim about the scourge of racism or dismiss anti-tax rallies as chimeras conjured by talk radio hosts without stopping to ponder whether opposition to their pet president is, in most cases, principled.

As the Anchoress (Elizabeth Scalia) pointed out, it's easier for Obama supporters to climb on a soap box about racism than to think critically or to talk honestly or to admit that "maybe, just maybe, Obama would have been a better president if he had first been a vice president."

Make no mistake: there are racists. There are also people with a vested interest in making the racism charge stick to anything or anyone, whether it fits or not. Henry Louis Gates and his fawning apologists found that it did not fit Sergeant James Crowley, but the lessons of the so-called "beer summit" faded faster than the frothy head on a pint of Guinness Stout for those who pin everything on "angry white males."

Last I looked, Alan Keyes, Lloyd Marcus, Stephen A. Smith, and Michael Steele were black, Michelle Malkin was neither white nor male, and "opposition" was not a synonym for "hate." Moreover, anybody sputtering about "Uncle Tom" could probably use a few lessons in economics from Dr. Thomas Sowell. And yet the Left thinks everyone I've mentioned in this paragraph is invisible, because all they can see are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, each of whom was quickly written off as evil. What's wrong with this picture?

Keep the books and lose the headmaster

Cushing Academy takes exactly the wrong approach to learning, while not surprisingly pushing techne into places it was never meant to go.

Variations on a theme

Remember Mohammed Ali's old "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" line?

Better to pray like Francis of Assisi and fight like Michael the Archangel.

Go team!

Burying the lede

What the New York Times (motto: "We suck less!") does best (in the United Kingdom, they don't bury the lede quite as much, fortunately).

Brooks gets what Carter does not get

David Brooks often disappoints, but here he's in good form, explaining why resistance to the president is, more than anything else, the residue of a longstanding conflict between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian views of government. Jonah Goldberg could have made the same point, but Goldberg is frustrated, and rightly so. Jimmy Carter has that effect on people.

Film School

Sonny Bunch on lessons learned from Michael Moore.

Home truths from the hot side of the stove

• George W. Bush is not a political conservative and didn't govern that way, either.


• Priestly celibacy makes more sense than some people seem to think.


• Jimmy "third rail" Carter really needs to put a sock in it. Maybe he's confused racism with killer rabbits?
  
• President Obama was right about rapper Kanye "party crasher" West.
  
• Novelist Dan Brown is officially beyond parody.(about which, more here).
• BONUS: Health care reform as currently pushed by Democrat majorities in Congress is "a raw abuse of power by the federal government for political purposes."
  
  

The blue chair

The O'Hannigan children have been back in school for awhile now, with the school nurse getting to know Jane rather well, but even though they've already celebrated homecoming at that particular institution, summer's not quite over yet. I can still hear the drone of cicadas in the woods near our house, and the fireflies were out tonight -- dancing for Patrick Swayze, maybe.

Everybody outta da pool

William Tucker on the "Tragedy of the Commons" as it applies to health care reform-- here's a snip:

Back at the dawn of the Environmental Era, Garrett Hardin defined environmental degradation as a common-pool problem. In a famous 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Hardin used the chronically overgrazed Medieval sheep commons as a model for the exploitation of commonly held resources like air and water. "Private property, or something formally like it," Hardin wrote, was the solution to environmental problems. (This was before environmentalists themselves began exploiting the common-pool resources of the American landscape by littering it with ugly windmills and solar collectors.)

The same logic works with health insurance. If coverage is provided by private insurers who have an interest in their own survival, they will maintain control of the system and exploitation will be limited. But if the federal government aggregates everybody into one big common pool, then everybody will think healthcare is "free" and nobody will have any stake in monitoring the system. The government itself will simply borrow or print money in order to win the favor of voters by maintaining the illusion that the system is sustainable. The tragedy of the commons becomes inevitable.

That pesky Second Amendment

Reason #35 from Terence Gillespie's list of 76 reasons to own a gun (one for each trombone, if you remember The Music Man):

Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Sonia Sotomayor. If you were impressed with Clinton’s torture of the word "IS" wait ’til you see what this bunch will do to the 27 words of the 2nd amendment. By the time they’re done they’ll have us believing the amendment has something to do with toaster ovens. Don’t laugh: I should have made each one of these people their own separate reason.

Mixed media day

In print or pixel:

Sister Toldjah scoops and turns with a zippy relay from the New York Post on the shortcomings of the New York Times. Amusingly, the NYT still believes that "premium quality journalism warrants a premium price."

When it comes to commentary, some columnists are more astute than others (though there may still be hope for Evan Thomas of Newsweek).

In pictures:

The Darwin movie hasn't managed to evolve (heehee) into a hit.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Lord, thinking similar thoughts, pens a damning survey of "media malpractice."

I hope Norman Borlaug gets a proper sendoff

The man whose work saved millions of lives always seemed to take a backseat to Paul "Population Bomb" Erhlich in places like Mother Jones magazine and Greenpeace, as well as among those who refer casually to "Frankenfood," or insist on thinking of humanity as a debit rather than a credit in the biosphere.

Borlaug was right and Erhlich has a very sorry record indeed.

R.I.P., Mr. Borlaug. You made the world a better place. "You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery."

Fathers and sons

"In a radio interview, Buddy Guy, one of America's greatest living blues guitarists, told a story about the son he sired but didn't raise. As the boy grew into young manhood, Buddy sought him out, hoping they could become closer. His son had also become a guitarist, but he was so full of bitterness at Buddy's absence that he wanted nothing to do with him or his brand of music. He had his own, more contemporary, rock star idols, most notably the singer formerly known as Prince. When the young man anonymously sought a teacher who could help him in his quest to emulate his idol, he was told that if he wanted to sound like Prince, he needed to understand how to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, the musician Prince had sought to emulate. And in order to understand Jimi Hendrix, the teacher said, he needed to learn about Hendrix's biggest musical influence, the guitarist Buddy Guy."

-- from the book, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, by Dan Kindloh and Michael Thompson (Ballantine Books, c. 1999, 2000)

Because nobody sings it better

A different perspective

George Neumayr with the well-turned phrases:

In his customarily controlling manner, Obama seeks to stunt the debate by setting up narrow propagandistic parameters for it: to reject the bill is "politics," to "improve" it is statesmanship. "The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action," he said. But the only sane response to a bad bill is flat opposition. Bitter experience has shown by now that "the risks" of an inactive federal government are well worth running.

Ann Althouse, while not as pithy, is also worth reading, as is Vin Suprynowicz. And the WSJ came loaded for bear, with the Marx Brothers in tow.

Rich Lowrey has our president's rhetorical style pegged.

Remember

Today belongs to the honored memory of James Debeuneure, Todd Beamer, and those 2,994 of their fellow Americans killed at the hands of fanatical hijackers on September 11, 2001.

This from Lars Walker via Touchstone is worth pondering. Bookworm also has a basketful of related posts.

Fact checking

Anchoress recommended Ed Morrisey's post over at HotAir, and after having read it, I can see why. It's a palate cleanser.

At the WSJ, they're humming "Won't Get Fooled Again." Meanwhile, James Kushiner has questions, and so does Right Wing Sparkle.

More than shrimpskin boots and cheap cheroots

...and even better than the Jimmy Buffet song (thanks to Julie for the find).

Still got it

(Mark Knopfler, "Speedway at Nazareth" -- with thanks to Webster Bull for mentioning it)

Gun-toting snowbillies and their allies

The woman whom the American Left most fears, (exhibit A) writing for a platform with more brand recognition than her own Facebook page:

Some 45 years ago Ronald Reagan said that "no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds." Each of us knows that we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick. We stand strongest when we stand with the weakest among us.

We also know that our current health-care system too often burdens individuals and businesses—particularly small businesses—with crippling expenses. And we know that allowing government health-care spending to continue at current rates will only add to our ever-expanding deficit.

[snip]

Let's talk about specifics. In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats' proposals "will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control" by "cutting . . . waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies . . . ."

First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such "waste and inefficiency" and "unwarranted subsidies" in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartistan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn't think so...

[snip]

Instead of poll-driven "solutions," let's talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let's give Americans control over their own health care.

Makes sense to me -- and this is, after all, the debate we should be having.

Andrew B. Wilson also has a thoughtful essay up on the politics of health care, with an emphasis on our president's less-impatient past, and Wilson taught me what "anaphora" is.

UPDATE: It will be interesting to see whether Gabriel Malor is as prophetic about our president as I think he is. The whole Ace crew (of which Gabriel is part) will undoubtedly be more reliable and quicker on the trigger than anyone at the New York Times.

Re the president's prime-time speech, Neo was not impressed with the trash talk/playground threat ("I will call you out") from the president (me, either). Meanwhile, Doug Powers blogged the speech in real time, and still managed to be funny. Rich Lowrey had a quick verdict: "It was a dandy speech, if truth doesn't matter."

Gabriel Malor checked back in to say that Rich Lowrey was too kind. John Hinderaker brought more light than heat to his analysis. And Sarah Palin is still making sense.

The company you keep

On being singularly unimpressed with the talent at the Institute for Policy Studies, where straining for moral equivalence at any cost has become an art form (and a widely-practiced one, at that).

Ne0-neocon has related thoughts.

Bday of the BVM

Don't keep it on the Q.T.

Crack the "Catholic Code" (and learn a little art history)

Labor Day linkiness

Van who?

Just kidding. I follow the news. But if all you've got to go on is the Associated Press and its ilk, you're missing out. Read Nice Deb instead, and Kathleen McKinley. Their "more in sorrow than in anger" criticism seems representative of conservative reaction to me, but Van Jones didn't make any friends among libertarians, either. Arianna Huffington is still blowing kisses in his direction, but does that really matter?

On the "analysis" side of the page, Get Religion is thinking about tomorrow, and David "Iowahawk" Burge continues to write uncanny satire that skewers northeastern conservatism in a voice associated with the Buckley family (both William F. and his son Christopher). Note if you treat yourself to Iowahawk's latest that his characterization of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is true to life, so "Emanuel" drops the f-bomb about as frequently as Joe Pesci in the movie Goodfellas.

Apart from politics, Christopher Johnson says that the Earth needs an "attitude adjustment," and Jerry Lewis is hosting another Labor Day Telethon to raise money for research into muscular dystrophy. The Anchoress has a customarily thoughtful take on Mr. Lewis up this morning.

I'm going to practice being thrilled rather than tethered.

UPDATE: This from Mark Tooley about an argument from Bishop Walter Nickless is good stuff:

Bishop Nickless asserted that Roman Catholicism does not teach that health care is a "natural right." This seemingly conflicts with a recent common assertion from Jim Wallis' Sojourners group, a leading cheer leader for Obamacare, and one of whose recent polemicists opined that health care is a "a human right" mandating the "obligation of governments to provide access to health care for all of their citizens." But the Bishop more carefully explained that health care is "political" right, not a natural right, whose logistical provision is a matter of "prudential judgment" and not direct church doctrine.

As a prudential judgment, the Bishop said Catholicism does "not teach that government should directly provide health care." Unlike national defense, for which "government monopolization is objectively good" because it limits violence and deters abusive private armies," health care should "not be subject to federal monopolization." The bishop cited preservation of "patient choice" through a "flourishing private sector" as the "only way to prevent a health care monopoly from denying care arbitrarily." He warned that a "government monopoly would not be motivated by profit" but would be motivated by "bureaucratic" quotas and self-defined "best procedures" over which most citizens would have little influence. Government should properly regulate the private sector "to foster healthy competition and to curtail abuses," Nickless wrote. But "any legislation that undermines the viability of the private sector is suspect," he said. And special protections are needed for private, religious hospitals that "most vigorously [are] offering actual health care to the poorest of the poor."

Bishop Nickless also cited the threat of a nanny state mandating "preventative care," which is a "moral obligation of the individual to God and to his or her family and loved ones, not a right to be demanded from society."

Surf City beach on a cloudy day

The ocean water was warm, the kids had fun, and most of the 120+ mile drive out to Topsail was with the convertible top down. It never rained more than a few drops at a time. A good day.

A "beer summit" for two Christians

My friend Gary has been talking about what evangelical Christianity gets right, and what it gets wrong. He is himself an evangelical Christian, and his thoughts on both of those subjects are worth reading.

His five-item posts got me thinking about what I would say in a similar look at what Catholic Christianity gets right and wrong. My lists would be shorter less symmetrical.

An aside about the vocabulary in play here: I'm of the opinion that a proper understanding of the Great Commission makes every branch of Christianity inherently evangelical, but Gary uses the term "evangelical Christian" in its popular sense, to encompass Christians who identify themselves as part of the legacy of the Protestant Reformation. He's not particularly fond of the term "Protestant," because it smacks of "being known for what we're against, rather than what we're for." I'm happy to accept his vocabulary choices unless I think they confuse more than they clarify, and usually they don't confuse.

With a tip of the old chapeau to my friend, here's what we in the Catholic church get right:

• Understanding the Holy Eucharist as the source and summit of Christian life, per the testimony of the early church and scripture passages like those throughout John 6.


• Sacraments generally, not least because they each have a communitarian "Wherever two or three are gathered in My name" rather than individual emphasis (people sometimes miss that even without knowing it).


• Devotional practices like praying the Angelus, the Stations of the Cross, and the rosary.


• Organizational structure, which for all of its sometimes-crippling reliance on a worldwide bureaucracy still preserves apostolic succession and the import of Jesus's special charge to Peter.


• Forthright defense of human life from conception to natural death.


• The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and what a practical help it can be.


• The canon of Scripture (and the concomitant understanding of the Word of God as most perfectly realized in a person, Jesus, rather than in a set of inspired books).


• Believing the Angel Gabriel when, on God's instructions, he called Mary "full of grace," and believing Mary when she prophesied that all generations would call her blessed.

What we in the Catholic church get wrong:

• Outreach to teenagers and single people too often gets shortchanged by pastoral emphasis on ministry to married couples and senior citizens.


• Adult religious education outside of sacramental preparation is typically a do-it-yourself venture.


• On any given Sunday (with a few honorable exceptions), preaching tends to shy away from hard questions and challenging doctrines.

What's interesting to me as I look my lists and then again at Gary's is that, apart from the obvious plus of what he calls "majoring in the majors" (by which he means that evangelical Protestant Christianity does a good job of keeping questions and answers about who Jesus is, what He accomplished, and how to respond to Him front and center), Gary spends comparatively little time on doctrine. The Westminster Confession, for example, does not appear on his list (cue a Seinfeldian "not that there's anything wrong with that").

I wouldn't expect to see any doctrinal shortcomings in his list of what evangelical Christianity gets wrong, and in fact they're not there -- but at least one may perhaps be inferred from what Gary calls the "lack of an overarching vision" of God's eternal purpose. That doesn't seem to be a problem in Catholic Christianity, which to me suggests that Gary might want to rethink his reservations about "enforced unity from a central command center."

Unpacking that concept, I agree with my friend about the difference between superficial unity and real unity, but wonder if he thinks of unity in the Catholic sense as a top-down thing driven by the pope and his henchmen in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, rather than what we Catholics actually understand unity to be, which is a bottom-up thing driven by Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.

Gary's contention that the New Testament doesn't "authorize anyone to enforce unity at bigger than local church level" is something I would (and do) dispute (Yo! Holmes! Jesus told Peter to "feed my sheep," and that was after He'd already made clear that He had sheep among the non-local Romans and Samaritans. Plus if you can explain the Council of Jerusalem and the argument between Peter and Paul in a "strictly local" context, then you must have puckered up to the Blarney Stone longer than I did ).

Even superficial unity has something to recommend it. Consider the saying about how you should "let a smile be your umbrella" especially when you're not in a cheerful mood: Like its annoying cousin ("turn your frown upside down"), it's based on the recognition that it's sometimes possible to "fake it 'til you make it." I'm also reminded of this sage advice from Fr. Benedict Groeschel: "True belief is a decision. It's also a gift. Accept the gift and you will make the decision."

In other words, ya gotta start somewhere ("meeting people where they're at," as the cliché runs). The Velveteen Rabbit was loved into becoming real, remember? This side of heaven there will always be dissenters in the big tent of Catholicism, and people who confuse their own orneriness with an allegedly ministerial "call to question," but strumming my six-string on my front porch swing, it occurs to me that carping about "superficial unity" as a criticism of Catholic ecclesiastical structure in contrast to the freewheeling roll-your-own-church ethos bequeathed to us by militant Reformers is rather like accusing the homecoming queen of being a bottle blonde so you don't have to admit that she really is strikingly pretty.

While we're on the subject, this series of six posts ("What I Love About the Catholic Church") from Fr. Dwight Longenecker also offers much to chew on, and Fr. Longenecker is smarter than I am. This is how he writes about the Catholic stew (and if this be "triumphalism," then so is breaking out the home movies and the photo albums when friends come over):

In the Catholic Church you find what is best from every other religion and denomination. It is syncretistic in practice without being syncretistic in dogma.

Do you like the austere asceticism and counter-cultural life of the Mennonites and Amish with their odd clothes, old-fashioned lifestyle and prophetic and pastoral way of life? We got monks.

Do you find Hinduism intriguing and fun with its flowers and candles and statues and temples and little festivals and offerings and devotionals? Catholics have all that without the idol worship.

Do you like Anglicanism with beautiful buildings, sophisticated educated people, fine music, sumptious liturgy and a spendid history? We've got all that.

On the other hand, do you like down to earth worship with folksy people involved in fellowship, peace and justice and making the world a better place? There sure plenty of that in the Catholic Church.

What about scholarship? Are you impressed with the bookishness of Protestants, the erudition of the Jewish scholars and the love of Bible learning among sincere Evangelicals? Catholics have it too.

What about Eastern religions? Are you drawn to esoteric spiritualities? Mystical experiences? Meditation? Monasticism? Catholicism offers a rich banquet of 2,000 years worth of spirituality.

Back to you, Gary. Thanks for being thought-provoking. You always are. And we haven't even gotten around to talking about science yet!

Back to revolutionary times

Matthew Spalding wrote a wonderfully informative essay on the Catholic church in American colonial times. It came out in print a few years ago but just got posted to the Web.

From Spalding's introduction:

Roman Catholics, led by Christopher Columbus, had been active throughout the continent during the era of exploration, leaving the American colonies a legacy of Spanish missions and French Jesuits. Maryland had already contributed an important chapter in American history by establishing religious freedom under its Catholic proprietors in 1649. But outside of these areas the colonial history of the Church was mostly nonexistent. The civilization behind the future United States was overwhelmingly English and Protestant.

Nevertheless, the meeting of Catholicism and republicanism in the New World remains of great significance for both Church and nation and forms the first full chapter of the history of Catholicism in America. Suspicious Americans, who only knew the Roman Catholic Church through the eyes of corrupt European politics, learned that Catholics were not the enemies of free government. Catholics, placed in the midst of republican America, learned that free government was not the enemy of the faith.

The essay dovetails unexpectedly with an old post of mine, but Spalding is better informed than I was.

Brigette goes yard

Even the headline makes a full trip around the bases: "They're Uncle Sam's kids now -- he paid for them."

Thomas Sowell followed Brigette (!) in the batting order today. He hit a triple. Woulda been a home run if he had mentioned that the doctor who offered a dire prognosis for the Lockerbie Bomber was not a specialist in prostate cancer. Still, Sowell's line about "surrendering on the installment plan" is apt.

And James Taranto sends Sowell home with an RBI single in today's column, which has more than its share of funny lines.

Another piece of the puzzle

I know a few people who wanted public festivals to mark the day that Sarah Palin stepped down as governor of Alaska. Some of them have also expressed impatience with the manifestos that Palin has taken to publishing through her Facebook account; in wanting Sarah to drink a tall glass of "shut the hell up," they tend to be particularly dismissive of her attack on ObamaCare and her "crazed screaming about death panels" (that's an actual quote).

Me, I don't think Palin actually did any screaming. A wink and a cutting remark delivered at conversational volume would be more her style, but no matter. Why argue style when substance needs a visit from Commander Vimes and Sergeant Detritus?

Anyone still wondering why the "death panel" label had surprising sticking power would do well to read a new column from Ross Douthat of the New York Times, which lends additional context to Palin's warning (first covered in this blog about three weeks ago).

Douthat is not a Palin fan, so far as I know. Moreover, he was not writing about her, but about the contrasting positions on abortion taken by recently-deceased Kennedy siblings. The pertinent part of his essay:

Because of Eunice Shriver’s work with the developmentally disabled, a group of Americans who had once been marginalized and hidden away — or lobotomized, like her sister Rosemary — was ushered closer to full participation in ordinary human life. But because of laws that her brother unstintingly supported, that same group was ushered out again: the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.

The boldface in that last sentence is mine, but it's not hard to connect the dots (hey, Sarah Palin did!).

Deal Hudson puts the matter plainly in a question:

Why don't the bishops understand? Whether or not abortion is explictly included in the bill, when and if it is passed, if the government runs health care, abortion will inevitably be part of its coverage.

Cue the closing argument from yours truly in the role of Captain Obvious: By talking about "death panels," Sarah was using shorthand. Trig Palin may have been playing at her feet while she typed that apt phrase into her Facebook essay. He needs no justification for being. Nobody else does, either -- and any health care reform that adds to the ranks of bean-counters who have authority to shape medical treatment is health care reform worth opposing, especially when "voluntary" conversations are brought to you by the same people who have no shame about indoctrinating children.

What I read in August

Three good books this month:

• Without Warning, by John Birmingham
  (reviewed for The American Spectator)
• A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
  (read on the advice of my friend Julia, and I'm glad-- it's a classic of juvenile fantasy literature that still holds up well, and could be fruitfully paired with Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator)
• The Hot Rock, by Donald Westlake
  (apparently the original crime caper novel, and it was great fun, dated only because one convict takes a side job selling encyclopedias door-to-door)

So far this year: 25 books

UPDATED because Julie asked for an update in the comments.