Month: January 2008

Image Of The Day

Image

This was sent to me and I cannot confirm it independently but it’s of a helicopter rescue mission in Afghanistan. Sometimes we forget what amazing people we have in the military – people with skills and balls most of us cannot even imagine. Whatever our differences about strategy and policy, I really don’t see any evidence that the vast majority don’t respect – even revere – the troops who are out there. I don’t mean this as a typical look-at-me-I’m-a-patriot-Fox-News kind of gesture. But these kids are astonishing.

Skeptical Of Obama

Leon Wieseltier:

Change: fine. A new generation: fine. A new politics: fine. It is all fine, and it is all contentless. Inspiration without content is a prelude to alienation. Newness is the oldest pitch in American politics. And I am a little sick of hope. ("I do not believe in miracles," says Herodias in Wilde’s play. "I have seen too many.") Also I have a queasy recollection of 1975 and the electrifying emergence of Jimmy Carter out of nowhere, in all his progressive pristinity, in a country made torpid by a war and an era of low politics. Why not the best? Skepticism is bad form in a bandwagoning moment. Yet I have a few doubts.

This kind of skepticism is entirely a good thing, I’d say. The one unfair critique is that Obama lacks policy substance. His campaign is laden with policy substance. Oodles of it. More, I wager, than Leon’s interest would ever bear.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"I should register here that I basically agree with this, in the sense that Huck’s populism has seemed more like a rhetorical pose than anything of substance. I should note, though, that I read something earlier this week on The Hotline — and I can’t find the link this morning, so you’ll just have to trust me — saying that as Arkansas governor, Huckabee showed a penchant for distrusting centralized power. If true, that’s something. But no, I don’t think Huckabee is a populist in any sense that Larison and Caleb (Stegall) would recognize. His rhetoric to that extent is largely therapeutic, giving people the satisfaction of populist feeling (and believe me, I’ve enjoyed it) without the real thing," – Rod Dreher, Crunchy Con.

Huckabee On Divorce

We clearly need a constitutional amendment to ban it:

Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life. Once we change that definition, then where does it go from there?

The Bible is clear. Jesus is actually explicit on this – and never mentioned homosexuality. Divorce is clearly forbidden. If we have strayed from such a core Biblical principle, and the Constitution is the place where we are supposed to resolve social policy, then Huckabee must support a constitutional amendment to ban divorce everywhere for everyone. So how about it, GOP? Are you serious about the Bible as the basis for politics or not?