Joan Walsh's monstrosity bears the title, "Are We Now an Officially Christian Nation?" Like, are we now officially using the word "officially" a bit too loosely?
I marvel at Barack Obama's courage going into the lion's den of evangelical Saddleback Church, where the membership skews Republican. I truly believe his kind of leadership will be crucial in moving the country forward after the polarizing Bush administration.Pay attention, by the way, to what Joan Walsh apparently considers courageous, and what she does not. Anyway, the concept of the "polarizing Bush administration" has always been somewhat laughable to me, especially considering his early, concerted, rebuffed efforts at reaching out--think No Child Left Behind, which was widely panned at the time by conservatives as pandering to the Senate Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, whose partnership was critical to the bill's passage. But no matter; after all, according to the Left's definition of "bipartisan"--"We all agree that liberals are actually right"--Bush's would be a fairly polarizing presidency. And that's just about the only way Barack Obama's presidency wouldn't be.
McCain occasionally does semi-courageous political jaunts--he went on an American poverty tour this spring, but when nobody was looking, at the height of the Obama-Clinton race, and (more to his credit) he visited the NAACP last month.Oh, and McCain was kinda-sorta courageous when he visited the NAACP. And he, erm, didn't do it as a political stunt. But those guys'll only make TV ads that suggest Republican politicians are personally responsible for lynchings; the evangelicals are just vicious!
Walsh plays up his being "comfortable talking about his Christian faith." All right, but then:
On the other hand, that bothered me a little bit too. I'm not sure why Obama voluntarily sat down for a nationally televised conversation about his private religious faith with a relatively conservative Christian leader, as though that's a reasonable station of the cross, so to speak, for a major American presidential candidate. There's no doubt Rick Warren's congregation has done good things on social justice issues, especially AIDS, but Warren has made no secret of his extreme views on abortion and gay rights (as well as his support for the Iraq War). Obama visiting the church, speaking there? Smart politics. Attending a nationally televised forum, almost as big a deal as a debate, at such a church? I think that was wrong.Where do I start here? Of course it bothered her; she clearly finds Christians, on the whole, distasteful. (Unless, of course, they can be Christians who, like Obama, use their religion mostly as a vehicle for liberal politics.) Beyond that, Walsh not only doesn't understand why a presidential candidate should take part in a debate held by evangelical Christians; she thinks it was "wrong." (!) Wrong to address a major group of voting citizens, wrong to allow evangelical Christianity, as an institution, to influence our government. Clearly, the only institutions that should be allowed to influence politics are liberal special-interest lobbying groups like the NAACP, NARAL, moveon.org, and so on. You know, people who don't hold "extreme views" (read: views that are different from mine). And if Walsh thinks that opposing the defining-down of marriage and believing that life begins at conception are "extreme" views, she's either been spending too much time on the Left Coast or watching too much TV. As far as Obama's "private" religious views, we might remember Russell Kirk and the fact that all political disagreements are, at their root, theological disagreements. We might also remember C.S. Lewis: "No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'"
Oh, by the way, Walsh thinks Warren treated McCain much better than Obama. He kept saying "mhmm" and "um-hm" during Obama's answers! For a member of the mainstream media, you'd think she'd have seen bias before; of course, I suppose seeing isn't perceiving. She probably never noticed it until this savage example of partisanship.
The next paragraph is simply so trite, so filled with unabashed vapidity, that I find myself unable to post it all at once. It must be enjoyed bite by bite. "I thought he used this opportunity...to hammer home his worldview and the specific policies he knows he and Saddleback members have in common--from the Supreme Court justices he wouldn't reappoint to arguing his crazy hawkish view on the Russia-Georgia conflict." In the first place, are we twelve, Ms. Walsh? "Crazy hawkish"? Beyond the teeny-bopper lingo, I guess it just doesn't take much to be a "hawkish" these days, considering that McCain's response to Russia's invasion of Georgia is to...I don't know, say it was wrong? Oh, and he wants to "persuade the Russian government to end violence permanently and withdraw its troops from Georgia," place "international monitors" in "war-torn areas," and "ensure that emergency aid lifted by air and sea is delivered." Quit harshing my conquest!
"My reaction to that creepy pandering was, simply, oy. But the crowd loved it." Does it really amount to "creepy pandering" when a presidential candidate says something the crowd agrees with? Ms. Walsh does know that, despite the likely political composition of her own personal group of friends, there are people out there who sincerely believe differently from her, doesn't she? Those people voting Republican aren't just hoaxes perpetrated by the military-industrial complex, represented primarily by Halliburton. (But how could such people live in a civilized state, like California? Indeed.)
I shudder even to place the next one on my blog, but I must press on: "He played his prisoner of war role to great advantage as well." Let's remember the "courage" of Barack Obama, at which Ms. Walsh "marveled." What exactly is her definition of courage, anyway? Simply being someone with whom she agrees? John McCain wasn't an actor in a movie in which he was a prisoner of war. Nor was his camp like Bridge Over the River Kwai or Stalag 13. He was actually tortured. Ms. Walsh, unlike you or Barack Obama, the most difficult period of his life wasn't the WGA writer's strike, or that time there was a really long line at Starbucks. I'm not saying that makes him a better presidential candidate; I'm not really saying anything about him. But this statement reveals not only Ms. Walsh's fatal unseriousness, but also an unseriousness that plagues society in general. Despite recent complaints, we have more material prosperity than has ever existed in the world; very few can remember a time when things were much worse. It's no wonder, then, that people forget what it took to generate and sustain this prosperity.
"I'm sure he did himself a little bit of a favor just by going. We'll see. The Jesus I believe in wishes he hadn't felt he had to, but maybe that's just me." Ms. Walsh, I suspect that it's more than just "maybe": The Jesus you believe in, evidently, is just you.
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