“poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

Thomas Hobbes (the fellow not wearing a New York Knicks uniform) may be best known for this quotation from his work Leviathan: Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short…a warre of every man against every man.”

This might be seen as an argument for liberty, but is actually an argument for the social contract of an ordered and (relatively, especially given his times) liberal state.

Regardless of political theory, it is clear that for the vast bulk of humanity, life is and always has been just as Hobbes described. What does this have to do with current NBA phenom Jeremy Lin? Just that one of Lin’s favorite Bible verses concerns how we ought to deal with these realities of life. From Romans 5:

3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

I’m not sure I’d have written “rejoice” in our sufferings, but I am sure that I lack many of St. Paul’s virtues. My view is to tolerate suffering as best we can, knowing that Christ suffered for us. Suffered far more than any of us can truly comprehend. We take our hope from that suffering and the glory that it led to. And we must know that in comparison our suffering is small.

Jeremy Lin is clearly not suffering at the moment. Yet if he truly knows that what goes up must come down, at some point he will no longer be the subject of public adulation. But I’m not worried for him. Jeremy Lin seems to be a disciplined yet hopeful young man. Given his rocky start in professional basketball (not drafted; cut from teams; riding the bench), his harshest test may be in his future: having achieved great fame for his skills, losing the spotlight if his skills are found wanting.

My sense is that Jeremy Lin, grounded as he appears to be in Scripture, will deal with defeat with grace. Grace enabled by his faith.

Cultural live wires

Confession: I pretty much agree with Rick Santorum on social issues. Except contraception, and in this I suspect I’m aligned with a pretty large majority of my fellow Christians. Even, I suspect, with my former co-coreligionist Roman Catholics. As a Catholic, it used to be “wink, wink, nudge, nudge: have you read humanae vitae? Interesting; wonder how it applies to us regular Catholics?

My agreement with Rick Santorum, however, does not mean we should nominate or elect anyone who preaches at us. We’ve already got one of those in Obama, who preaches to us, incessantly, about how we must be “fair.” By which he means increase taxes on the “rich” and let the “poor” be wards of the state.

If I thought Rick Santorum could win the general election, I’d be for him. He’s a man who has never wavered in his social conservatism. He’s a man who will never back down from defending his positions. Both excellent traits. Both of which will likely convince independents and moderates that he’s not their man.

Mona Charen at NRO summarizes it nicely:

If the fall campaign is all about what Rick Santorum said about gay adoptions, or a dozen other cultural live wires, it will not be about the Republican party’s most important and compelling issues: the ballooning national debt, the gross expansion of the federal government into every realm of life, economic growth, the flaccid foreign policy of the Obama administration, and the vain pursuit of “green” energy at the expense of abundant domestic oil and gas.

Again, I wish people would get past what Rick has said and likely will continue to say. Unfortunately, the opposition will paint him as a theocrat, one who would attempt to enact his vision of morality into law. I’m not sure they’d be entirely wrong.

Not my fault

President Obama just announced “I’ve got another five years coming up.” Elections are just so last century, I suppose. Think this was a gaffe on B.H.O.’s part? Perhaps.

But the special arrogance of Obama may well be behind his speech yesterday on the rapid rise in gasoline prices. After all, since he’s guaranteed reelection, he does not need to give any rational explanations for what he’s going to do about those prices.

Remember that this is a man who has promised that his election would, among other things, cause the seas to stop rising. Gas prices? Hah; no worry. The Mighty One can fix this before lunch.

Not so fast. What Obama actually said was, in so many words, “hey, it’s not my fault.” And there’s really nothing I can do. The Wall Street Journal nicely shreds Obama’s incoherent and mutually exclusive excuses. From today’s lead editorial, the gist:

a) gasoline prices are beyond his control, but b) to the extent oil and gas production is rising in America, his energy policies deserve all the credit, and c) higher prices are one more reason to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers while handing even more subsidies to his friends in green energy.

As the Journal points out, increases in oil production now happened because of leases approved under President George W. Bush. Obama, on the other hand, has terminated many leases that were approved, and caused major areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to be off limits. Then there’s the Keystone-XL denial.

Liberals, including Obama, are wont to say that issuing permits and leases today won’t fix gas prices in the near term. It will take years to bring them to market. Yes, but, it’s been many years since lefties have been denying the development of proven reserves.

Just think of the downward pressure on oil prices if our oil and gas industry were to be truly unfettered by unreasonable and extreme enviros. Then just think of how we could replace so much of what we import from unstable dictatorships such as Venezuela.

But that kind of thinking is anathema to Obama. He and his lefty allies in Congress would much rather raise taxes and impose more regulations on those evil oil barons. Oh, wait. You mean if you increase the costs of producing something, you’re likely to get less of that something?

Whatever else they may believe, liberals like Obama seem to think they have a special immunity to the laws of supply and demand. Wrong again.

20

And then there were 20 debates. Didn’t watch; the best, or worst, depending who one is supporting, is that one of the four candidates left standing will say something really stupid.

I say enough. We are not nominating the captain of the debate team.

A rational argument may be made that Newt owes his survival to this point to his superb debating skills. And that Rick Santorum would not have become, almost by default, the “not-Romney” once the gloss of Newt’s debate performances paled in the glare of his foolish pronouncements and the weight of his personal baggage.

It isn’t too hard to imagine that, absent these debates, right now we might be having primary contests between front runners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

A prophet without honor

John Podhoretz writes in the New York Post “Santorum is animated and motivated by an unpleasantly bleak outlook on the morals and manners of the country he now says he wishes to lead.”

If one believes that over one million persons are being killed each year, as Santorum does, “bleak” doesn’t do this holocaust justice. The problem for many of my fellow Christians, including those of us baptized Catholic (me included), is that we don’t want to be told our failings. We don’t want to be reminded that our Church is against abortion, is militantly pro-life.

Rick Santorum holds fast to our Catholic beliefs. He is right to have a bleak outlook. That said, John Podhoretz is also right that such a truth-teller can’t be elected president. In different words, Rick Santorum is a prophet without honor in his own country. A country, our country, that does not at all like to be told we have failed in protecting those who are weakest: the unborn.

But John Podhoretz is also right. As I’m sure we’ve all been told at some point in our lives, by a parent, priest, drill sergeant, or friend, “It ain’t right, but that’s the way it is.”

Schadenfreude?

Republicans used to be called the political party of root canals and cold showers. Bunch of cranky, old white men with hearts of stone. Men who took joy in seeing the working man suffer when they were out of work.

This brings up the subject of unemployment. The official statistic has been trending sharply downward these past two months. This may be good news, or, more likely, just not-so-bad news, as many people have given up even looking for work. And hence are not counted as “unemployed,” thereby boosting the Obama Fiction Machine’s trumpeting that something or another must be working.

Here’s a bleak truth: I’m rooting for truth in advertising; i.e. getting the actual numbers of people unemployed, underemployed, and those who have simply given up looking for work. I’m not likely to get the truth. That’s not how politics works.

The graphic, via Powerline, shows the Gallup organization’s stab at the real unemployment rate. Which is predicted to be 9.0%. Ungood, if you are an Obama supporter. Very good if you are, like me, one who knows that the Obama administration’s economic medicine, with large doses of regulations, higher taxes, and restrictions on inestment will kill the patient.

Long story short: I root for higher unemployment. Not because I like to see people suffer. Lord knows my father spent more than a few months unemployed. It’s hardly a good thing, except it allowed him to find a better job, from which he eventually was able to retire comfortably from.

There are some people who do take delight in the suffering of others. The German loan word is schadenfreude, literally adversity-joy. Joy in the suffering of others. Ugly concept; expressed exactly with a cruel, German efficiency.

For the case at hand, is it simply schadenfreude to find good news in higher unemployment numbers? Or, rather, is it that some of us prefer the defeat of Obama in order to prevent further disaster?

Simply stated, we should welcome some pain now, if that pain leads to removing the infection that is the statist, redistributionist Obama administration. If left untreated, that infection may become untreatable.

There will always be unemployment; there will always be some who need help and are in misery. Our task is to take the long view and minimize the numbers of those so afflicted in the future.

Don’t say it’s not theology

The Left, very much including enviro-freaks such as the Goracle (you know, the guy who is now sorry he invented that interweb thingy ’cause it uses too much energy), hates your SUV. Even as they fly around the world in private jets (“hey, I paid for that carbon offset!”)

Well, recently, Rick Santorum got into a heap of mainstream media-generated trouble when he likened Obama’s environmental crusade to a “theology.” The Left, including their enablers in the media, absolutely hate it when someone actually speaks the truth about one of their crusades.

On occasion, the mask slips, and a lefty speaks the truth. Such a gaffe (h/t Jim Geraghty) is this telling remark by Stephen Chu, the Solyndra Kid who is the Secretary of Energy:

“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe…”

Congratulations, moron. You’re perhaps the dumbest person with a Nobel Prize. You gave away the game: we, the bien pensants who are Rulers of the Universe know what you, the great unwashed Americans, should want: the Chevy Volt.

That’s right, people. You’ll buy a car that is twice as expensive but twice as hard to fuel, because it’s what we think is good for the planet. Never mind that the electricity that fuels your car comes mostly from burning coal, we say it comes from unicorns riding on rainbows, and the pollution from its generation isn’t in your neighborhood.

If gas prices go high enough, you’ll come begging to us, the Lords of the Environment, and you’ll pay what we ask for those electric cars…

The point? Radical enviros, very much including mokes like Chu and his boss, Obama, have complete faith that they are right, that solar and wind and unicorn farts are the energy sources that can replace those dirty combustion engines.

Faith is another way of saying belief in things seen and unseen, which are beyond scientific proof. In a word, theology.

AP scores

Via Jay Nordlinger’s Impromptus today, this from the Obama Campaign Associated Press:

The world according Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney: Europeans are socialists. The Chinese are currency manipulators. Russia can’t be trusted to abide by nuclear agreements. The Palestinians are out to destroy Israel. And the U.S. is too generous with humanitarian aid.

The tone and tenor of the AP article? Look at that troglodyte Romney; isn’t he stupid and evil?

Except that each and every one of those points is exactly correct. Does any rational person doubt any single one of these facts?

Good for Mitt for, as lefties are wont to say, “speaking truth to power.”

Tribes

Growing up in New York City, it was the usual practice for people to refer to themselves as “Irish,” “Jewish,” or “Italian.” Not “Irish-American,” or Jewish or Italian-American. Our identity was set by the condition of our birth.

We also lived in segregated enclaves in New York. We had, in our enclave, a lot of O’Gradys, Reillys, Kellys and others whose parents or grandparents were fresh off the boat from the Ould Sod. Likewise, we had Schwartzs, Cohens, and other Jews, first and second generation Americans.

In my neighborhood, there seemed to be no Italians or Poles or WASPS, for that matter. At least none that I was aware of. For those rare species, one would have to travel at least ten blocks. I never met or knew anyone who was not Irish or Jewish, until I hit junior high school. In which we had a few Italians. It wasn’t until I went to high school (a public school) that I found out there were Christians who were not Catholic and people who were Puerto Rican and black. Who knew?

The point is that we lived as tribes, each one as separate and apart from the others as we could manage. Then I became a Bible-believing Christian, a Protestant. And the truth about our so-called tribal nature is perhaps best expressed in Galatians 3:28-29:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

Now that’s equality; equality under Christ Jesus. Being Christian means (or should mean) not having as one’s first identity your national origin. That’s tribal, and it flies against the notion of us all being one in Christ.

True but…

Step aside, Newt Bigmouth Gingrich. Here comes Rick Santorum, truthteller extraordinaire. The headline at Fox News may be a tad misleading, when it blares “Santorum Questions Obama’s Christian Values.”

Misleading, but the takeaway by the opposition is sure to be “Santorum claims President Obama is not a Christian.” What Rick Santorum actually said is reported by Fox:

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator known for his social conservative views, said Obama’s agenda is based on “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.” He later suggested that the president practices a different kind of Christianity.

“In the Christian church there are a lot of different stripes of Christianity,” he said. “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian.”

Obama has made statements about what Jesus would do with your tax dollars and how income redistribution is what Jesus required. These were offensive, to say the least. We’re in the business of electing a leader, not a preacher. Especially offensive is any would-be preacher who brings secular politics into any discussion of faith. Like, say, Obama’s long-time “spiritual mentor” Jeremiah God-Damn-America Wright.

Is Obama a Christian because he claims to be one? I would say no, simply because of Obama’s two-decades’ tutelage in Jeremiah Wright’s un-Christian church. Could Obama have actually become a Christian since leaving Wright’s grasp? Certainly possible.

That said, either way, it’s not for me or anyone else to decide. God will sort it out in the end. So, did it hurt Santorum to state the truth that Obama has spouted “some phony theology?” That is, income redistribution, courtesy of the government?

Unfortunately, none of this helps Rick’s campaign. Is this fatal? Not if he wins Michigan and goes on to take the nomination.

Then, if Rick Santorum is our nominee and Team Obama brings his views on theology to us, by all means, let’s have a debate: Jeremiah Wright’s vision of Christianity vs. actual Christianity. And, oh, Barack, how is it that you didn’t leave Wright’s side until it became politically costly to stay? Were you just not paying attention for twenty years? Or did you agree with Wright?