Capers With Carroll

Democracy requires a difficult-to-maintain veneer of decorum over the hottest of passions. When all else fails, the two sides must still be able to speak to each other politely and be heard over the din. There should also be respect for office. One test of this might be self-inspection on the part of those either angered or pleased about Rep. Joe Wilson’s outbreak during President Obama’s healthcare speech: Did they have the identical or an opposite reaction when the Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at President Bush?

For the record, I disagree with Rep. Wilson on several points. First, I believe a speech by the President to Congress should be interrupted only by applause, whether polite or exuberant, or it should be submitted to in stony silence, out of respect for both institutions. Second, Rep Wilson’s explosion came when President Obama declared that no illegal alien would be covered under the coming healthcare plan. As I have expressed before, I don’t believe most of our undocumented neighbors are the kinds of bogey-men they have been made out to be. Even with ten or fifteen million of them combined, I don’t believe people working at minimum wage in farm fields or sweatshops harm America as much as the executives who have given themselves huge bonuses out of money the government intended for bailing out mismanaged businesses. (If it turns out any recipient of those multimillion-dollar travesties was here illegally, I say, yes, ship them home with empty pockets.)

On the other hand, when it is journalists or bloggers who catch a president or congress spinning facts to the detriment of truth, it is our duty to point that out. The subject over which I am best prepared to support such a charge is abortion. In Wednesday’s speech, President Obama asserted, “And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

Fact: H.R. 3200, as it currently stands with an amendment written by Rep. Lois Capps (R-Calif) and approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee (30 pro-abortion Democrats favoring and 28 Republicans and pro-life Democrats opposing), the bill “explicitly permits the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, pro-abortion advocate Kathleen Sebelius, to include abortion in the services offered by public option and requires abortion coverage in the government health plan if the Hyde amendment is ever reversed. HR 3200 authorizes taxpayer-funded affordability credits and the Capps amendment specifically requires taxpayer subsidies to flow to plans that include abortion, but creates an accounting scheme designed to give the impression that public funds will not subsidize abortion. The Capps amendment also requires that a plan that includes abortion be made available in every region of the country.” Source

Fact: Later that same day, this same committee defeated (30-29) a bipartisan amendment proposed by Reps. Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) designed to prevent mandated abortion coverage in the essential benefits package. Source

Conclusion: Unless President Obama is proposing to remove the Capps Amendment and replace it with wording from the Pitts/Stupak Amendment, he lied in his speech this week.

Secondly, Obama’s reference to federal conscience laws “under our plan” can only be true in a sense so narrow he would need to cross his fingers behind his back. Last March, the Obama administration published in the Federal Register a proposal to rescind all Bush-era protections for medical personnel who refused to participate in abortions on moral grounds. Obama apparently means that the current “our plan” promises to protect those conscience laws which remain after his previous plan has eliminated them altogether. To this observer, that also looks like a lie.

Two years ago, when speaking to a Planned Parenthood audience, candidate Obama promised to eliminate these conscience protections and to include abortion-coverage in his national health insurance package, “In my mind, reproductive care is essential care,” he said. “It is basic care. And so it is at the center and at the heart of the plan that I propose. Essentially … we're gonna set up a public plan … that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services. We also will subsidize those who prefer to stay in the private insurance market — except the insurers are going to have to abide by the same rules in terms of providing comprehensive care, including reproductive care. I still believe that it is important for Planned Parenthood to be part of that system.” (Note: By "reproductive care," Obama means abortion and by “part of that system,” he means federal subsidies.) Source

I was alone with my wife in the privacy of a living room when candidate Obama sat with Rick Warren and described himself as a moderate on abortion. Even then, I did not blurt out, “You Lie!”

The record, however, shows that during three different years in the Illinois Senate, Barack Obama led opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. At the same time, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly and the US Senate voted 98-0 to pass nearly identical legislation. Even the pro-abortion group NARAL remained neutral. But “moderate” Obama fought hard to protect the rights of hospital personnel to abandon living babies and let them die. Then he denied he had done so. He maintained that denial until the case against him was so strong that he could maintain the lie no longer. On August 18, 2008, just two days after the Saddleback Forum, his campaign admitted the truth. (Links to Obama’s votes on Illinois BAIPA)

It damages our Democracy when a congressman interrupts a president’s speech to call him a liar. But the damage is at least as severe when a president lies to Congress and to the American People. We do need to fix our broken health insurance system, and some of what the President is proposing impresses me as reasonable. However, when he uses his condescending “I’m an adult, so stop acting like a child” look to cover his lies on abortion, and then gives the same look to put down the legitimate fears of others, how can I as a voter trust him?

It is also difficult for me to trust the President when groups with whom he has partnered get caught in blatant disregard for the laws of our country. One prime example is the number of times hidden cameras or microphones have caught staff members in Planned Parenthood facilities across the country telling purportedly under-aged girls to hide the age of the men who have impregnated them, thus allowing Planned Parenthood to evade reporting laws on statutory rape. Unfortunately, those videos have become common enough to lose their punch, and I still haven’t seen where Obama has even acknowledged their existence.

Already, however, the Obama administration is racing to sever its connections with ACORN after a video that left me gasping when I saw it yesterday. An under-cover investigative couple walks into an ACORN housing office in Baltimore: She pretends to be a prostitute in need of housing to bring in and set up undocumented girls (under age 15) from El Salvador; He wants to divert funds from this “business” to make a run for Congress. Without batting an eye, two ACORN staffers pull out code books and begin explaining how it will need to be set up to best avoid taxes. The good news is: the Obama Administration will pull ACORN’s contract to help with next year’s census. The bad news is: Obama has worked closely with a group long-accused of lying and misrepresentation, and never saw a problem until all plausible deniably disappeared.

The President not only lies, but he hangs around with people for whom lying is a way of life.

I say that as civilly as I can manage.

A sample of the Planned Parenthood videos: hiding statutory rape, accepting donations earmarked for eugenics, showing as a lie PPA denials of racist sympathies

Just one of several editings of the ACORN videos. Variations abound.

For several months, I’ve been checking in on this Metepeira sp. single mom where she lives in a Montrose rosemary bush. During the summer, she enjoys certain advantages over other denizens of the Southern California housing market. She pays no association fees, and faces no adjustable mortgage. Sure, there are strings attached, but she controls the strings. She thatches together an awning in the center of her web, here and there tacking on the carcass of an insect she’s sucked dry. Notice, she’s not the one being sucked dry.

But in today’s rain, she looked pretty glum. It was obvious she was retaining water. She’s an obvious candidate, first for a bailout, and then a little stimulus. Seems everyone's a candidate these days.

I took this picture on low density, so it misses out on a lot of details. You have to trust me that she has eight legs and eight eyes. That’s kind of the way I look at the packages being put together now in Washington. When an $800 billion bonus is being designed on short notice by a president, his cabinet, 100 senators, and 435 congressmen, the first thing that is certain is that no one understands the details. The second is that hundreds of pet projects that couldn’t see the light of day last year suddenly found the light. Picture yourself winning a spending spree at Walmart, up to half a year's salary, but only what you could personally drag to the checkout counter in fifteen minutes. Then multiply that by astronomical dollar amounts, 100 senators and 435 congressmen. A thousand Metepeiras couldn’t spin such a tangled web. Finally, imagine how you will feel to learn it wasn't a true giveaway. The full price went on your credit card.

And then next week we will do it again with Round Two of the mortgage bailout, doubling-or-more the Bush bailout that seemed incomprehensively massive such a short time ago. There is no way for me to analyze the Stimulus Bill. The point is to create jobs, and even Bridges to No-Where create jobs. I can’t even judge the Bailout. It’s a roll-of-the-dice whose repercussions will be felt for several generations. I can, however, make a few observations I haven’t seen elsewhere.

First, the bailouts are a de facto method of devaluing the dollar. Nations do this when they want to make their goods more attractive to world markets, and overseas products less attractive to buyers at home. It's probably something we need, but it’s something we ought to acknowledge we are doing if that is our goal. The law of supply and demand says that if three trillion dollars are dumped into a stable or over-supply of housing, each dollar already there will buy that much less, thus devaluing all dollars. It is a quiet way to roll back pension obligations and union contracts (of which no entity is so burdoned as government).

Similar situations have occurred twice in my lifetime. Home ownership had been out of the reach of most urban dwellers until the GI Bill at the end of World War II, but in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my parents’ generation found that most couples could buy a house on one income. In the last 60’s and 70’s, many couples decided they could gain a market advantage by applying a second income to home buying. True, the average new house got a little bigger, and added a few amenities, but even older homes doubled and tripled in price. In the supply-and-demand bidding war for houses, suddenly a second income became a requirement for home buying. Baby Boomer buyers were working twice as hard for the same house, and World War II era sellers were carting the new-found wealth to the bank. Boomers eventually got some of those bank deposits back as inheritances, but it was a poor trade-off for many.

Prices again took off during the Clinton and Bush years as government policies allowed for riskier and riskier loans, but a similar pattern emerged. Easy loans allowed bidding wars that left sellers rich and buyers enslaved. In California, we then penalized the new buyers with Proposition 13, which gave them property tax rates three or four times higher than the house next door.

So with that record, we are now going to pour two or three trillion dollars into the housing market. The banks will get theirs. The sellers will get theirs. The big losers are buyers and those on fixed incomes. Fortunately, there will be a few new jobs earning our new devalued dollars. Those will help cover the taxes that the next generation will owe to pay for all this.

For a lot of young couples looking for housing, it may be time to learn a lesson from the Metepeira: Thatch together an awning, and hope for dry weather.

It is housekeeping day here at Capers, having been out of town for four out of the last five weekends and a full half of the weekends since my last post (Aug. 28). I have not gone ten postless weeks for lack of something to say. These were the ten final weeks of the most interesting (albeit frustrating) election of my lifetime. As theater I give it five stars. The same ten weeks also saw an economic ("collapse?" "adjustment?" Choose one.) that I have been expecting since the late 1970s.

However, in August I began a new and strenuous teaching assignment. There’s something about teaching middle school, having to be constantly up for a straight eight hours, that leads to collapse when the kids go home. It’s hard to get much done in the evenings, even to grade papers. I’m also studying for an upcoming exit exam for my master’s program. Then, in October, I married off two of my sons. One of those weddings took us to China for seven days. (More on the weddings when I can sit here a little longer.)

So today I am tidying up. Wednesday I removed the McCain/Palin and “Vote Pro-Life” posters from my front yard. Vandals had relieved me of some of my task. I understand a local high school teacher gave extra credit points as a bounty for students to bring in the campaign posters of those on the Left’s blacklist. Had I done the same for my side, I would have been suspended without pay. What are we teaching our children?

Today, I am taking down the McCain poster (I never had time to change it to McCain Palin after the convention) that I’ve had in my sidebar since the California primary (where it replaced the Huckabee poster I hung up in January). It’s part of making my transition from McCain Partisan to Obama’s Loyal Opposition. He will be my president, and I want him to be successful. A failure for any president is also a failure for the whole country. I am committed to speak ill only of his policies, and not his person. I am committed to representing him in the best light possible to my middle school students. I am committed to pray that God will grant him wisdom and stamina. However, where he has made unfortunate promises to interest groups, I will pray that he has the fortitude to stand up to them and explain that their desires are not in the best interests of the country.

I must admit, I am only a short way into the grieving process. Obama’s election has been bitter for me to accept. Every vote I have cast since 1980 has been animated by my opposition to legalized abortion. Yet this election moves America’s most extreme pro-abortion voting record from the Senate to the White House. I fear the incremental Pro-life gains accomplished in 28 years and in all 50 states will be entirely lost even before the next mid-term elections. Obama has promised to do just that. I fear the coming Supreme Court will deliver disaster upon disaster throughout the rest of my life. Conditions will require a whole new level of commitment from those of us in the Pro-Life Movement. And yet, our own internal ethic refuses to allow us the kind of reactions displayed now by those who stole my lawn signs and who will seek once again to overturn a clear vote by the people. Somehow, when the same left-leaning voters who gave Obama a 60.9% statewide majority also vote to join the unanimous chorus of all 30 states whose citizens have ever voted on a definition of marriage, those in the streets try to insist that it is the majority which is out step with the mainstream. Go figure.

So I am mowing the lawn, sweeping out the pool, sorting the laundry, and getting ready to cull from among the 700 photographs I took in China.

If you watch carefully, a few of the keepers might even show up here

The Faith of Barack Obama
By Stephen Mansfield
192 pages
Thomas Nelson (August 5, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1595552502
List Price $19.99

“And you know something is happening
but you don't know what it is
do you, Mr. Jones?” Bob Dylan (1965)

When Bob Dylan first sang “Ballad of a Thin Man,” I was fourteen and attending a Methodist church in California, not unlike the Methodist church sixteen-year-old Hillary Rodham was attending in Chicago. Barack Obama was four, growing up with an atheist single-mother in Hawaii. During the years I spent at UCLA and Hillary divided between Wellesley and Yale, Obama lived in Indonesia, attending the mosque with his folk-Muslim step-father. So, by all odds, which of the three should be the Democratic nominee for president tonight?

Win or lose in November, Barack Obama has already become the most interesting biography of 2008, and (more-so than for the great majority of politicians) it is a faith-centered biography. I will admit, Obama’s faith provides me with a Mr. Jones moment, but though I may not like it, I want very much to understand it. When publisher Thomas Nelson offered free copies to bloggers who would read and review the book, I jumped at the opportunity.

With The Faith of Barack Obama, Stephen Mansfield has given us a quick introduction to the man, his faith, and the religious contexts of American politics in 2008. It is 30 pages shorter than the similar book he wrote about the faith of George W. Bush, but that book came after Bush had already served one term as president. This book made it into print during the short interval between the end of the primary season and this month’s convention. For that reason it sometimes reads like a long magazine article. Mansfield bases his study on Obama’s books and speeches; interviews with Obama staff, associates, and academics who have studied the senator; and published articles about Obama. But apparently Mansfield never had an opportunity to sit down with the candidate. As such, the book complements but does not replace such events as the interview at Saddleback Church, which occurred too late to be included in the book.

A look at Mansfield’s other work suggests he was much more at home writing about Bush than Obama, but he does a remarkable job of setting aside his personal preferences and doing justice to the Democratic candidate. He takes the time to address blogosphere myths and deflate them. The faith of Barack Obama is Christian, not Muslim. Mansfield argues it was never even sufficiently Muslim that any Muslim could now argue that Obama was an apostate. While I accept his argument on that, it is worth noting that in most of the Muslim world, having once been registered as a Muslim, it is illegal to change a registration and become Christian in the eyes of the law. In the unlikely event that Obama returned to take up residence in Indonesia, he would not be able to reregister as a Christian. However, what is more disturbing to an Evangelical like myself (and Mansfield simply lays out the facts, without making any judgment) is that Obama’s faith journey has brought him to universalism, a belief that while he has chosen Christianity for himself, other paths work just as well for other people. What did not come out of the Saddleback interview, where (to a Christian audience) Obama gave an Evangelical explanation of his personal salvation, is that he is just as comfortable with a Muslim or Buddhist explanation for someone else.

Mansfield gives considerable attention to Obama’s relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and to the larger currents of Afro-American theology as they’ve developed over the last forty years. Again, Mansfield lays out the facts without judgment, and that theology is no more twisted than an equivalent slice of White God-and-County Evangelicalism, but there is much to make me grimace there, as well. If this is God’s corrective, then my reaction is not unlike the prophet Habakkuk, who when he complained that God was standing idle in the face of egregious Hebrew sin was sent reeling by God’s answer that He was preparing to bring the Babylonians against Israel. The ways of God are not the ways of man.

A shorter section of the book attempts to define the currents in contemporary American Christianity by identifying one each with Obama, Hillary, John McCain, and George Bush (I would have thought to use Mike Huckabee). This section is interesting, but less convincing. For Obama, the salient point it develops is that the Democratic candidate sees government as an agent of God, capable of implementing God’s righteous on earth. For the Democratic Party—which for thirty years has seemed to consider God an enemy—this may be a major innovation. In a previous post, I noted how Obama reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, who likewise saw government as a civil Christianity. I believe much good came out of Wilson’s administration, but also much that we would live to regret. Perhaps that can be said of any administration, short of Christ’s millennial reign.

I sensed Mansfield’s concluding chapter drifting. I suspect I would have done the same. For one thing, we are still so much in the thick of the moment. For another, any Evangelical trying to look at Obama without being judgmental must expend enormous energy sitting on his own hands.

America has made a cottage industry of dissecting the religious faiths of Dead White Presidents. Mansfield is breaking welcome ground with an attempt to describe the living faith of an American who might be our next leader. I will not vote for Obama, but I now understand him better. There is much about him to respect, as well as much to make me think he is the oncoming Babylonian judgment of God. Only a small portion of that feeling comes from reading Mansfield’s book, but it’s a portion I’m glad I have.

Previous Post: Ruminations of Ingrid, Berlin, and Obama

For me, a frantic August is approaching its close (after a thirteen year hiatus I am back to teaching 8th grade U.S. History), but I am still chewing over two sets of images from July.

The first set grew out of the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt and for a glimmer of hope that Colombia’s forty-year civil war might soon come to a peaceful end. By coincidence, at the moment news hit the streets of the Colombian Army’s audacious scam on Betancourt’s FARC captors, my Colombian-born son was back in Bogotá, the first visit there by any member of my family for the same thirteen-years mentioned above. My son had taken his girlfriend to Colombia, and to a mountaintop overlooking Bogotá, to propose marriage. (She accepted!)

On the night my son was born, just as the obstetrician made the decision to deliver the baby by cesarean, an ambulance rushed in with a senator who had lost much of his face to an assassination attempt. While medical personnel turned their attention to the senator*, my wife waited on a gurney somewhere in the inner sanctum of the hospital and I roamed halls full of live TV reporting. An angry crowd filled the parking lot, shouting imprecations against the perpetrators. I spent the wee hours of the morning pondering what the future might hold for my son, for Colombia, and for a world polarized (at that time) into free democracies and Marxist totalitarian regimes. That the wounded senator was also a leader of the Colombian Communist Party did not override the human bond. I wrote a note of sympathy and handed it to the senator’s wife. In my mind, we were all in this together.

The second set of images centers around Barack Obama’s speech in front of Berlin’s Tiergarten Siegessäule, and the 200,000 Berliners who turned out to provide him with rock star adulation.

The Siegessäule, or “Victory Column,”
surrounded by scaffolding during my
second trip to Berlin, in 1976.

All by themselves, Berlin and the Tiergarten bring back powerful personal memories. In 1972, I made my first trip to Berlin, then a divided city. On a foggy October night, I walked several miles along the western side of the Wall, suddenly coming upon the burnt-out hull of the Reichstag building, still boarded up from the 1933 fire that Adolf Hitler used as an excuse to shut down Germany’s parliament and place the blame on the Communists. The next day I climbed a tower near where, nine years before my visit, John F. Kennedy declared Berlin to be the definitive case study of the differences between Communism and the Free World. Ecstatic crowds showered Kennedy's entourage with flowers, rice and torn paper. Almost like adulation for a rock star.



From the tower, I spent several hours studying No-Man’s Land and pondering the nature of the world in which we lived. Then I snuck into a Tiergarten thicket and rolled out my sleeping bag for the night.

Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan would come to the same spot to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev to tear the wall down. Of course, on the eve of Reagan’s visit 25,000 Germans rioted in anger.

It seems to me Berliners have a very poor record for recognizing the U.S. presidents who served even Germany's best interests. The Wall had gone up thirty-nine days after the newly inaugurated JFK’s first meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. In Vienna, the Soviet dictator gave JFK a tongue-lashing for which he had no comeback, leading Khrushchev to size-up Kennedy as inexperienced and naïve. Khrushchev decided he could get away with both building the Wall and planting missiles in Cuba. Kennedy performed well in answering those challenges, but a better job in Vienna might have preempted them altogether. Ultimately, the Wall only came down some two years after Reagan gave his challenge, and it fell due to conditions Reagan was one of the few to foresee.

In 2000, I went back to Berlin. I wanted to show my children where the Wall had once stood. I happened to be standing near the Brandenburg Gate at the moment French President Jacques Chirac arrived to visit German Chancelor Gerhard Schröder, to join him in walking under the Brandenburg Gate, and into the Reichstag building, where he addressed Germany's parliament. Symbolically, it not only brought the Cold War to its final punctuation, but it completed a normalization of French-German relations that erased Hitler and all the memories that his name brings to mind.



Others have pointed out the parallels between Kennedy’s eagerness to meet with Khrushchev and Obama’s offer to meet with leaders like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It’s true, I don’t see John McCain making the same mistake. However, the parallels I see match Obama more with President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, a progressive and a university president, leapt to the presidency after two years as governor of New Jersey. As an academic, he’d written the standard college text on the workings of Congress. As war broke out in Europe, he ran for reelection as a peace candidate, even as he understood there would be war. He led us into that war, calling it “The War to End All Wars.” Then, with the war won, he toured Europe to rock-star adulation. He carried with him a remarkable set of progressive ideals, but in the hard bargaining at Versailles, he could not sell them, even to the friends who owed us the most. He won the war and lost the peace. With all that European adulation, he could not draw the European leadership into decisions for their own best interests, and for all his knowledge of Congress, he could not talk them into buying the meager treaty he could bring home. One has to admire his attempt, but his failure guaranteed the outbreak of World War II. At Versailles, he may also have set the stage for my generation’s war in Vietnam by snubbing Ho Chi Minh and that nation’s aspirations for independence.

There is a fascinating moment in Ingrid Betancourt’s interview with Al Jazeera in which she describes the campaign for the Colombian presidency that she was waging at the time she was kidnapped. She believed as president she could negotiate with the FARC. Betancourt stops and asks the Al Jazeera interviewer for the English equivalent of the French word ingénue. “Naïve,” she is told. “Yes, I was naïve,” she answers. In fact, she was glad hard-liner Alvaro Uribe was elected. He had served the country well in standing up to FARC. In a different interview right after her release, she reported that FARC had counted on the Colombian electorate alternating between hard-line and “Peace” presidents. FARC's leadership assumed they could hunker down during the hard-line administrations and recover and thrive while stringing along the presidents who were willing to negotiate. What they had not counted on, and could not recover from, was the constitutional change that allowed Uribe a second term.

This is my worry about Barack Obama: Momentum has shifted in our favor in Iraq, but we have paid too high a price to win the war and then lose the peace. We have also forced Al Qaida to hunker down, but it is naïve to think that like the FARC, they haven’t planned a rebound as soon as the U.S. elects a “Peace” president. On Colombia, Obama and congressional Democrats seem even more eager to let the FARC enjoy enough of a breather to get up from the mat.

I will have more thoughts on Barack Obama in my next post.

*(The Colombian senator was Hernando Hurtado, targeted by a dissident member of FARC. Mrs. Hurtado could not risk a paper trail leading back to a North American serving with an Evangelical mission, but somewhere I still have an oblique and unsigned telegram of appreciation.)