Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

USMC vs. HUMAN NATURE

Is there no end to  egalitarian folly?

OBAMA THE DIVIDER BEGETS TRUMP

Jonathan V. Last writes:

. . .  As an empirical matter . . . Obama is the most divisive president since Eisenhower, because that's when Gallup began measuring such things: By the pollster's reckoning, the partisan gap in Obama's 2012 approval rating is a yawning, historic 76 points. Remember how divisive the Bush years were? The Obama years have been worse. And it's not just a partisan divide. In 2014, a Washington Post/ABC News poll asked respondents if they viewed Obama as more of a divider or uniter. It wasn't even close among independ-ents, 59 percent of whom said he's been a divider.

Still, words are nothing compared with Obama's actions: He rammed Obamacare through without a single Republican vote. And when he couldn't find even a bare majority of votes for his immigration reform or gun control bills, he simply proceeded via executive decree.

When no one on the left was asking for it, Obama pursued the narrowest-possible reading of religious liberty, resulting in Supreme Court showdowns with a Lutheran school, which wanted to be free to hire its own ministers without government interference, and with the Little Sisters of the Poor, who didn't want to be forced to pay for abortifacients. There was no reason for Obama to pursue these policies except as an exercise in premeditated divisiveness. On the question of religious liberty, Obama has sought to undo a national consensus and foment conflict. In doing so, he set in motion a slow-rolling constitutional and cultural collision that is likely to end badly. The only reason this chaos isn't apparent to the general public is because Lutherans and nuns don't riot.

Then there's race relations. Obama was elected in large part because of his promise to heal racial wounds. It hasn't worked out that way. In 2001, Gallup found that 70 percent of blacks and 62 percent of whites thought race relations in America were somewhat or very good. By the time Obama was inaugurated those numbers had flipped, with 61 percent of blacks and 70 percent of whites (having just absolved themselves by voting for Obama, one suspects) rating race relations as good. During Obama's tenure, both numbers have been in freefall. Today, only 51 percent of blacks and 45 percent of whites think relations between the races are good.

What happened? First came Obama's decision not to prosecute two members of the New Black Panthers who had been charged with voter intimidation for their actions outside a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day in 2008. (In case you think the New Black Panthers are just a bunch of scamps, in 2014 two other members of the group were arrested for plotting to kill the chief of police in Ferguson, Mo.)

Then came Obama's penchant for wading into every racial police controversy that reached the front page of the New York Times. He took sides against the Cambridge cops in their arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The police in this case were almost certainly in the wrong; but no one needed the president of the United States preening about it. He did the same with the death of Trayvon Martin, showing up unscheduled at a press availability to talk about the case the week after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting. Did Obama come before the cameras to reassure the public and vouch for the rule of law? No. He stoked the fires, telling America, "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago." This was a ridiculous exaggeration. Martin was (to put it charitably) a troubled teen with a history of problematic behavior; 35 years before, Barack Obama had been a promising student at an elite private school. By likening himself to Martin, Obama was viewing the episode through the most reductive and demagogic lens possible.

When the Michael Brown shooting turned Ferguson into a powder keg, Obama was ready for the cameras, calling it "heartbreaking" and sending his Justice Department in to ferret out wrongdoing. (They found none.) In a world full of real police abuses — such as the killing of Eric Garner in New York and the shooting of Walter Scott in Charleston — Obama seems to have a knack for tying himself to the cases where the police were actually in the right. It's enough to make one wonder if Obama can't tell the difference between proper and improper police conduct — or if he just doesn't care.

All of which lead to Obama's semi-embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement. As Heather Mac Donald has documented, Black Lives Matter is not an innocent college protest movement. It is an ugly strain of anarchic racialism that has led not just to the defense of looting but to the killing of police officers. Obama does not merely refuse to condemn Black Lives Matter — he attempts to rationalize it, explaining, "There is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities."

To his credit, President Obama has never offered to pay the legal fees of supporters who assault protesters or warned/promised violent riots should he not get his way. Donald Trump may be Obama's heir, but Trump has raised the stakes.

But it's important to understand that Trump is Obama's heir—or, at the very least, the man who wants to inherit the world Obama made. Part of the reason we have Trump today is that Obama set the table by dividing the country so completely; maneuvering so as to pit Americans against one another.

One of the hallmarks of the great dividers, of course, is that they never shut up about how hard they're really trying to unite everyone. Two weeks ago, as violence broke out in a series of incidents at his rallies, Trump insisted, against all evidence, "I'm a uniter."

And back in 2012, as he was accusing the Republican party of waging a "war on women," Obama insisted, "I don't think .  .  . anybody who's been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country. We've always tried to bring the country together."

TRUMP ANSWERING QUESTIONS

Jonah Goldberg describes Trump's technique in answering questions:

If you listen to Trump’s answers to almost any question about how he will fix a problem, he uses up the first 95 percent of his time explaining, re-explaining and demagoguing about how bad the problem is. (That is, if he’s not talking about polls.) Then in the last few seconds, he says we’ll fix the problem by being really smart or by winning or by hiring the best people. In other words, he has no idea how to fix it.

Goldberg despairs over the anti-anti-Trump conservatives for whom he has had great esteem in the past (e.g. Newt Gingrich, Bill Bennett)  but who now make excuses for  Trump saying he may be okay after all.  (Read the whole piece)

Other links:

   **  The 202 People, Places and Things Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter: A Complete List

   ** Liberty University newspaper interviews Chancellor Falwell on his personal endorsement of Donald Trump.  (Falwell was wined and dined)

  ** Michael Signer - Here's what demagogues like Trump do to their countries when they take power:  "The Donald has all the traits of his political forebears, and he'll present all the same dangers."

   ** On evangelical support of Trump:

Stepen Prothero:  He [Trump] has not hypnotized evangelicals into forgetting the foundations of their faith. He is simply revealing the fact that their faith is now more political than theological. The white evangelicals who flock to his rallies like their parents once did to Billy Graham revivals know that he lives a life comically at odds with teachings of the Bible and the examples of the saints. But his political theology resonates powerfully with their narrative of decline and revival. Classically that narrative ran from sin in the Garden of Eden to redemption on the cross. Today it takes place in an America that has fallen from its founding glory yet will, by God’s grace and Trump’s hand, be made great again.

On days like Super Tuesday, it is hard to remember that there are still born-again Christians who take their marching orders from the Bible rather than from the Republican platform. . . 

MICHELLE MALKIN CALLS OUT DRUDGE FOR SMEARING TED CRUZ

Drudge backs Trump.  That's  no secret.  Drudge pushes live-streaming Trump events in red ink -- even ordinary campaign stops-- and he posts whatever he can that is negative about Ted Cruz.  For that he uses huge letters and headlines.  Michelle Malkin calls him out in the following video.  In it she accuses Drudge of a double standard.  He posts Ted Cruz being prayed over, but not Donald Trump (who also has been prayed over).

 

TIM KELLER AT HONG KONG UNIVERSITY: "HOPE BEYOND THE WALLS OF THE WORLD"

Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, and one of the world's most articulate and thoughtful Christian communicators, here offers a helpful consideration of "hope."  It's is all the more interesting given his audience and the occasional interweaving of his reflections on Buddhism.  Keller is the author of The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism among a number of other books.

 

The "Faith and Global Engagement" group at the University of Hong Kong offers a number of past lectures and presentations online which I will want to explore in the near future.  

SURVEY: CHURCH-GOING EVANGELICALS PREFER OTHER CANDIDATES TO TRUMP

The narrative that "evangelicals support Trump in large numbers" needs closer analysis.   The Family Research Council offers the following perspective."  (Bolding is my own)

 Very few people have been able to wrap their heads around the "bizarre" relationship between Donald and evangelicals. Part of the reason for the unusual alliance, Peter Wehner speculates in yesterday's New York Times, "is that many evangelicals feel increasingly powerless, beaten down, aggrieved and under attack." But there may be a better explanation for Trump's popularity with this bloc, the Barna Group points out, which is that some of these "evangelicals" aren't evangelicals at all!

If you want to understand where true evangelicals stand, they argue, ask the churchgoers. "Most polls are based on self-identification," the Group has found, "instead of what people do or believe... Reuters and others have found that church attendance distinctly decreases evangelical support for Trump, who has the least-religious supporters among the GOP candidates."

Barna's definition of evangelical is more "rigorous." To qualify, voters have to meet nine key faith criteria ranging from a personal commitment to Jesus Christ to agreement on who God is. Using that filter, true evangelicals, the Group notes, "whose faith hinges on obedience to God's commands, are far more interested in the character of candidates than any other segment." Looking at the election through Barna's lens, the mirage of Trump's broad evangelical support begins to fall away.

"Overall, far more evangelicals view Trump as 'very unfavorable' than 'very favorable," the survey notes. "Researchers found a 38 percentage point difference between the extreme ends of Trump's favorability spectrum... When Barna asked its 869 survey respondents to choose their favorite candidate, evangelicals who identified as Republicans split between Cruz (38%) and Carson (35%), trailed by Rubio (14%) and Trump (11%). Practicing Christians also chose Cruz first (30%), followed by Carson (20%), Trump (18%), and Rubio (15%)."

The liberal media would love to perpetuate the story that evangelicals are abandoning their morals to vote for someone with questionable character. The liberal media would love to perpetuate the story that evangelicals are abandoning their morals.   And perhaps some are. But Barna's research makes it clear -- true evangelicals haven't lost faith in their core values.And perhaps so

ANDREW C. McCARTHY - POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND DOMESTIC TERROR

As I've stated before, I regard Andrew C. McCarthy as the sharpest and most reliable mind around when it comes to Islam and terrorism.  Here, in his recent address at Hillsdale College, he summarizes the facts as they exist and as they are ignored by the politically correct Obama administration.

 

Update 3/19/16 - Hillsdale College has published a slightly edited version of Andrew McCarthy's speech in its February 2016 Imprimus issue.  It is titled "Islam -- Facts or Dreams?" and begins by offering McCarthy's biography:

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. A graduate of Columbia College, he received his J.D. at New York Law School. For 18 years, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and from 1993-95 he led the terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Following the 9/11 attacks, he supervised the Justice Department’s command post near Ground Zero. He has also served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and an adjunct professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and New York Law School. He writes widely for newspapers and journals including National Review, PJ Media, and The New Criterion, and is the author of several books, including Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotages America.

McCarthy begins his speech thusly:

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.