Scare Tactics

As the runaway freight train that is Obamacare careens down the tracks toward its October 1^st rendezvous with destiny, President Obama has finally found a political tactic that he finds reprehensible. He is accusing Republicans of trying to “scare people out of a good deal.”

Imagine that, politicians using scare tactics. Oh, the humanity! I’m not sure what political planet our President has been living on his entire life, but I have a news flash for him, scare tactics are the mother’s milk of politics and both parties would be utterly lost without them. Here’s a question for you, name one political issue over the past 50 years that has not been either passed or defeated without both political parties trying to scare the bejesus out of us? Below are just a few examples:

 

Welfare Reform 1994:  Democrats warned us of tent cities full of homeless people in every city and starving children roaming the streets, our urban centers plunged into Dickensian chaos.

Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: President Bush, Sec. of State Powell and a cast of thousands assured us that if we didn’t invade Iraq, Saddam would soon be able to attack our cities with WMD’s.

Medicare Reform attempts 2010: Paul Ryan proposed a plan to reform the most actuarially doomed social welfare program in history and for his efforts became the star of Democrat commercials featuring him literally driving Grandma’s wheelchair off a cliff.

Sequestration battle of 2013: In the weeks leading up to sequestration back in March of this year, we were assured by Democrats that a reduction in Federal spending of 1.2% would unleash calamity on a Biblical scale. Planes would fall from the sky for want of air-traffic controllers, tainted meat would be eaten by Americans for lack of food inspectors, and aircraft carriers would float powerless, in the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

 

So, now that his signature legislative achievement is under attack by the opposition party, President Obama suddenly discovers the horrors of fear and manipulation in politics. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

  

Help Me Out Here

President Obama continues to enlighten me about economics. The other day he gave a speech to the Business Roundtable in which he offered this gem:

Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt; it does not somehow promote profligacy.

As puzzled expressions began popping up in his audience of successful businessmen who know a thing or two about profligacy, he clarified thusly:

The average person thinks raising the debt ceiling must mean that we’re running up our debt.

Count me among the average. Let’s see, the only thing in either of these quotes that happens to be true is the statement that the debt ceiling has in fact been raised by Congress “hundreds of times.” Unfortunately for the President, each of those hundred times has resulted in an increase of our debt. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s what is known as a 100% correlation. Matter of fact, it would seem that from an historical perspective, if one wants to increase our national debt, the quickest, surest way to do so would be first to raise the debt ceiling! What could the President possibly be thinking? Since I refuse to accuse my President of an intentional, deliberate lie, I chose to believe that he is simply delusional. For example:

Let’s say that you were issued a credit card from Capital One with a $5000 credit limit. Then you promptly went out and racked up $5000 in purchases. Although you would be within your rights to do so, the credit card would now be unusable. What to do? Well, you could begin to pay down the card over time, and each time you did, it would restore a portion of your credit. But there would be another option. You could petition Capital One for an increase to your credit line. If they granted your request by doubling your credit line to $10,000, I suppose that technically that would not be increasing your debt, just your credit. One assumes that this is the President’s line of flimsy reasoning. But we all know what happens next. Since you now have access to $5000 more dollars worth of credit, you will find a way to blow through it as sure as night follows day. When the President looks back at our fiscal history, he sees the same fact, that every single time our national debt ceiling has been raised it has also been breached, every single time.

Yes, we average people who suspect that when our debt ceiling gets raised that will mean more debt, suspect as much for an excellent reason, Mr. President. But what do we know? We live in the real world where if we don’t make our car payments, someone comes and tows it away. The elites in Washington just raise the debt ceiling.

Help me out here, am I missing something?

My First Fan Letter!

About three weeks ago, I received that rarest of correspondence, a personal letter delivered by the United States Postal Service. It came in an odd sized envelope and was addressed in cursive. I was intrigued. My mail box is usually stuffed with sales circulars, bills, brightly colored credit card solicitations, and during election season, grave warnings from candidate A about how candidate B wants to take away my guns and declare sharia law. So, imagine my delight to find an old fashioned, honest to God letter?

Back inside, I showed my prize to Pam. “Look honey, I got a letter!” My daughter perked up at the news, “Well?? Aren’t you going to open it?” So, open it I did, with nervous anticipation. It was a typed letter stuffed inside a strange blank greeting card that featured a family of unknown ethnicity outside their humble hut somewhere in the third world. Turns out it was a village in India. I immediately figured that this was another announcement by one of my former Sunday School students that he or she had decided to go on a mission trip to save these poor people, and I was about to be asked for a donation. But then I opened the letter and read the first line:

Dear Mr. Dunnevant, Perhaps I should call you Doug since we have been close friends for quite some time now…

What the heck? Wait, was this…might this be? I read the next line:

I stumbled upon one of your blog posts about a year ago and have been hooked ever since.

No freaking way!! I had just received my first piece of fan mail! Is the internet great or what? But then it occurred to me that since this particular fan had evangelical sympathies, I might be in store for a diatribe about my views on gay marriage. Maybe this person had had it up to here with my snarky put downs of Baptist church services. I proceeded cautiously.

I quickly learned that my fan was a married woman with three grown children living in North Carolina, who had been introduced to my blog by the father of a girl who used to date my Son, who as fate would have it, also used to be her boss. This was six degrees of separation on steroids. She went on to say how much she had enjoyed reading my blog, how much it made her laugh and how our two world views had much in common. Throughout, she tried desperately to convince me that she was not some unhinged lunatic stalker, sometimes hilariously so. Then she got to the real reason for her letter:

I have followed your book writing and am intrigued…

She then cataloged for me her professional resume as an executive secretary, then made this astonishing offer:

So therefore, despite the awkwardness, I am offering, free of charge, to proofread your manuscript… I really thought that I would go through life anonymously reading your words, but the thought of your book going out with a missing apostrophe or comma troubles me too much to stay silent.

I then read the letter aloud to Pam and Kaitlin and they both thought she was hilarious, and were especially impressed when she ended the letter with practical tips on how to survive the wedding planning process since she was about to marry off her oldest daughter in just a few days. Kaitlin grabbed the letter from me and scanned it carefully with the critical eye of an English Literature major. “Dad, she has perfect diction and I don’t see even one punctuation error.”

To make a long story short, my new proof reader is the bomb. She has made it through chapter 21 of 30, actually likes the work and has caught a ton of bad punctuation, clunky formulations and butchered syntax, and is well on her way to a shout out on the acknowledgment page if I ever get the thing published. Plus, I’ve made a new friend.

Very cool.

Schadenfreude

The world is in a crazy, messed up place right now. There’s the Middle East with the Syrian circus and a soon to be nuclear Iran. In this country we’ve got Biblical-grade floods creating islands in Colorado, and deranged men waltzing into supposedly secure military facilities, whipping out shotguns and killing people. We have a completely dysfunctional federal government about to officially run out of money while simultaneously trying to implement a 3000 page health care law that no one, and I mean NO ONE understands. So what’s on my mind today? Baseball, baby!! There are pennant races afoot, so the end of the world will just have to wait until October.

Can the Nationals do the impossible and come from beyond oblivion and sneak into the playoffs as a wildcard? Probably not, but its baseball, so one never knows. All season long the Nationals just haven’t clicked. They’ve seemed tentative, tight, as if the burden of expectations was too much for them. Then, out of nowhere, back in early August, it was as if they all looked at each other and said, “What the hell, we’re out of it now, so let’s just go have some fun.” Since August the 9^th they are the hottest team in baseball. Just last night they swept a double header from the Atlanta Braves and are only 4 and a half games back.

Then there’s the American League wildcard race where four teams are still battling for the last spot. After 150 games, these four teams are still separated by a mere 3 games. The Cleveland Indians, Baltimore Orioles, Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees are slugging it out every night as if every game was the seventh game of the World Series. It’s been spectacular baseball. Watching the Red Sox utterly dominate the Yankees down the stretch, to watch the aging Yankees fall victim to a pulled muscle here and a stiff neck there has been something close to heaven for me. I believe the word is Schadenfreude, a word so rich in all the wrong human emotions that it could only come to us from the Germans. Experiencing pleasure from observing the misfortune of others is not a healthy place to live long term, I know. But for these last few weeks, watching the Yankees crumble has been like renting a fabulous house at the beach. I don’t intend to stay here forever, but what a fabulous vacation spot!!

Verbal Diarrhea

Have you ever noticed how politicians of all stripes never answer any question posed to them with a simple yes or no? Watching our hapless Secretary of State these past few weeks has been excruciating in this regard. Whenever he starts answering a reporter’s question, it’s like the voice of the unseen adults in those Peanuts television specials, “Waa, wa wa wa waaa.” Then it becomes the Russian Foreign Minister’s turn and his answer takes one sentence.

But it’s unfair to single out Kerry when practically everyone in Washington does it. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that they were paid by the word. So, I would like to offer politicians from all parties a short tutorial in directness and its many virtues, not the least of which is clarity, something in short supply at the moment. Below you will find many of today’s most vexing problems facing our country. Then, you will read what I think about them, in other words, what I would say to a reporter if asked my opinion. Then imagine any politician speaking this way.

# Senator Dunnevant, do you think that Obamacare should be defunded?  No.

But, aren’t you against Obamcare? Yes.

Then, why don’t you think it should be defunded? It’s the law and we don’t have the votes.

So, what do you say to your voters who want it repealed? Win more elections.

# Senator Dunnevant, are you troubled at all by the growing influence of Vladimir Putin and Russia in the Middle East, in particular his growing prestige in Syria? No.

But, aren’t you at all concerned about the rapid decline of America’s prestige and influence in that strategic part of the world? Concerned? No. Ecstatic? Yes.

Why would you be ecstatic? I can’t think of two people who deserve each other more than Vladimir Putin and Bashir Assad.

# Senator Dunnevant, in less than three weeks, Washington will run out of money to operate the government through the continuing resolution agreement of this past summer. Would you be willing to support a raising of the debt limit and an end to sequestration? No.

But Senator, without such an agreement, the government will have to shut down and most experts believe that the Republican party will get the blame. That’s not a question.

Ok. Why are you willing to shut down the government knowing that your party will get the blame? We spend way more money than we bring in. So, accordingly, we are broke.

Yes, but what about the blame thing? What about it?

Don’t you worry about your future? No. I worry about the country’s future which won’t be much of one if we don’t stop spending money we don’t have.

# Senator, what are your views on Gay Marriage? None of the government’s business.

# What about taxes? They are too high and not enough of us pay them.

# Are you in favor of granting amnesty for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently in our country? No.

So, does that mean you’re in favor of rounding up 12 million people and deporting them all? No,that’s a logistical impossibility.

Then how do you suggest fixing this problem? Allow all of those here to remain here but deny them the right to ever vote in an American election.

How will that solve the problem? It won’t. But it will remove immigration policy from the Congressional calendar forever, since without the prospect of 12 million new voters, my Democrat friends will lose interest in the issue.

# One more question Senator, if you were King for a day and could pass any legislation you wished, what would it be? Term limits.

I Stand Amazed?

http://shar.es/izahq

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post slamming the Pope for his muddled thinking on the nature of salvation. Well, this morning, I ran across the above article entitled “Why Christianity Should be Patron of the Arts,” written by a Catholic apologist named Barbara Nicolosi. Although she writes about her struggles with the Catholic version of church, her complaints can be universally applied, I think, to most all of Christianity. Reading this article, I found myself thinking that if I were a Catholic, I could have written it, because so much of what she says, I have felt for years.

I will not here lay out her entire case. That’s why I provide the above link. This is an argument that you need to read in its entirety, if you’re interested, to form your own judgment. But one thing she said practically jumped off the page.

 Too many churches are not an ante-chamber of heaven in their interiors, but instead are ugly, drooping, often “in the round” spaces calculated to distract us not by the Divine, but by each other. Banal banners and signs, plastic or half-hearted flowers, filthy carpets, stained ceilings, and ugly oak pews with the varnish half gone. There is truly, nothing to look at, never mind by which to be inspired.

What she is describing is that strange melancholy that comes over me every time I walk into most church buildings, an unnamed disappointment that I feel at the ordinariness of it all. The architecture is about as far away from majestic as humanely possible. Yes, I know, that one can have an encounter with God in a barn, but why must the place where we are meant to have weekly encounters with him be so pedestrian?

Anyway, give this article a read and let me know what you think.

Thanks For Clearing That Up

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Pope Francis for clearing up the last 4000 years of recorded history. The human race has been in a death struggle with this whole business of sin and redemption, good and evil, since the Garden of Eden. Perhaps the most existential battle in all of human history has been between the world’s great religions, each with conflicting truth claims, each proscribing different ways and means of personal salvation. But now this new Pope comes along to assure us all that it was all a big misunderstanding. See, it doesn’t matter any longer whether someone actually believes in God are not, since we’re all going to heaven anyway. Not only that, but we also learned from the Pontiff that there’s apparently only one sin, the sin of failing to obey your conscience. I, for one, am very relieved to hear this, since I have always had trouble with several of those Ten Commandments.

Pope Francis shared this new world-changing truth in a letter to Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of the newspaper, La Repubblica, which had published a list of questions for the Pope to answer. It is here where the world learned this new ground breaking truth:

    “Francis wrote: “You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.”

Ok! Seems a bit convoluted and a bit contradictory, but hey, he’s infallible. For example, if someone doesn’t believe and doesn’t “seek the faith”, why would they ever go to him with a sincere and contrite heart?  And what happens if a person obeys their “conscience” when it’s telling them to strap on fifty pounds of explosives so they can detonate themselves in a crowded subway killing 100 innocent people?

Listen people, I’m no theologian, and I’m certainly no Catholic basher, in fact I’ve always had much admiration for certain aspects of Catholic tradition. But trying to fathom what Pope Francis could possibly been thinking here is a struggle. Perhaps a clue to his thinking can be discovered in the first sentence of the newspaper article that reported the story in the first place;

   “In comments likely to enhance his progressive reputation…”

I’ll say! You can’t get much more progressive than, “don’t worry folks, God has unlimited mercy so we’re all good!” Later on in the article, we discover that the Pope’s comments were further evidence of his attempts to shake off the Catholicism’s fusty image, and overcome barriers to an open dialogue with all.

Well, personally, I’ve always been quite fond of Catholicism’s fustiness, and the uncomfortable words of scripture are indeed quite a barrier to overcome. But I always thought that this was the point of Evangelism. Proves how little I know.