Mark Steyn on Barack Obama’s Voters

I commend to you the “Happy Warrior” on the last page of the current National Review (which I just got today).  In it, Mark Steyn (he of America Alone/I’m being blacklisted by the Canadian Human Rights Court fame) talks about what voters are looking for in a president, and that it’s far too much compared to what presidents can deliver.  A sample, and then you’ll have to go find a copy of NR for yourself:

It’s a bit late in the day to say what I’m looking for in a candidate. So let me say what I’m looking for in a voter. It was nicely summed up by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic, contrasting McCain and Obama back at the end of primary season as they clinched their respective nominations: “The enormous crowd in the Xcel center seems ready to lift Obama on its shoulders; the much smaller audience for McCain’s speech interrupted his remarks with stilted cheers.”…

The speech that so moved Marc Ambinder was one Senator Obama largely devoted to the significance of himself: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

“Heal” is the operative word here. Barack is not one of those warrior kings who cure sick children on weekend breaks from slaughtering foreigners, but rather the apotheosis of a therapeutic culture: He will “heal” the planet and thereby bring “closure” to the Bush era. The other day I found myself stuck in traffic behind one of his Hopemobiles — that’s to say, a van whose rear bore a giant poster in vaguely Soviet-realist style of the Great Healer captioned not by his name but only by his message: “HOPE.” Smaller placards dotted around it fleshed out his policy platform: “KIDS’ FUTURE? VOTE DEMOCRATIC.” “HOPE NOT FEAR? VOTE DEMOCRATIC.” I felt a sudden desire to order up a gross of bumper stickers bearing the slogan “FEAR HOPE.”

Excellent.  This would be enough to make me subscribe, if I didn’t already.

Timotheos

RJN on Abortion and the Election

[The entire essay is here.]

We are two nations: one concentrated on rights and laws, the other on rights and wrongs; one radically individualistic and dedicated to the actualized self, the other communal and invoking the common good; one viewing law as the instrument of the will to power and license, the other affirming an objective moral order reflected in a Constitution to which we are obliged; one given to private satisfaction, the other to familial responsibility; one typically secular, the other typically religious; one elitist, the other populist. These strokes are admittedly broad, but the reality is all too evident in the increasingly ugly rancor that dominates and debases our public life. And, of course, for many Americans the conflicts in the culture wars run through their own hearts.

No other question cuts so close to the heart of the culture wars as the question of abortion. The abortion debate is about more than abortion. It is about the nature of human life and community. It is about whether rights are the product of human assertion or the gift of “Nature and Nature’s God.” It is about euthanasia, eugenic engineering, and the protection of the radically handicapped. But the abortion debate is most inescapably about abortion. In that debate, the Supreme Court has again and again, beginning with the Roe and Doe decisions of 1973, gambled its authority, and with it our constitutional order, by coming down on one side.

Timotheos

Wendell Berry on Abortion

[From the essay, “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity,” in the book Another Turn of the Crank]

That I believe abortion to be wrong does not mean that I cannot imagine situations in which I would support a woman’s decision to have an abortion–or in which I would have an abortion, if I were a woman, or perform an abortion, if I were a doctor.  Because we are human, we don’t have the happiness of choosing always between good and evil.  Sometimes we must choose between two evils, and Idon’t recommend turning away from anybody in that predicament.  Because our life does not always offer us clean-cut choices between good and evil, we are going to need forgiveness.  And I believe in the possibility of forgiveness, as I believe in the possibility of just remorse.

We are nevertheless entrusted with the care of our fellow human creatures.  If abortion is wrong, as I believe, it is wrong because it excludes some of our fellow humans from our care.  But to think that abortion is wrong is to risk dangerous oversimplification if we cannot follow our thought to its logical conclusion.  If we cannot justify violence to unborn human beings, then how can we justify violence to those who are born, or to the world that they are born into?

The issue ultimately turns on one question: Is a human fetus a human being?  I believe that it is.  Anybody who believes that it is not must say what else on earth it might be.

Timotheos

Read This

If you are pro-life and you’ve ever considered voting for Barack Obama, read this.  And Prof. George doesn’t even include the fact that Obama, as he admitted last night, will only nominate SCOTUS justices who will promise to uphold Roe v. Wade.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. For starters, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest. The abortion industry laments that this longstanding federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, ”forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead.” In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

But this barely scratches the surface of Obama’s extremism.

Timotheos

They Don’t Even Vote For Our President!

I didn’t know George Bush was running a secret anti-Obama network in Great Britain.  Or maybe it was McCain.  Never mind, they’re the same person anyway.

Timotheos