Michael Gerson has a fascinating Op-Ed in today’s Washington Post. He argues that Barack Obama’s record on the Iraq War is mixed and will be a weakness for him in the general election. I think Gerson is right. Here’s an excerpt: “Obama will find — as John Kerry found in 2004 — that Americans are suspicious of a prospective commander in chief who votes against funding U.S. troops in the field. “The Iraq war determined the paths for McCain and Obama. But there is a large difference between them. McCain eventually won his nomination because he showed political courage in the face of overwhelming pressure. Obama may eventually win his…
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Fetus Fatigue
The evangelical left has been chastising other evangelicals for their “narrow-minded” focus on abortion. Folks like Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Shane Claiborne and others are encouraging evangelicals to “broaden” their horizons when it comes to Christian involvement in the public square and in politics. I have argued on this blog that Wallis and friends are actually demoting abortion on the list of evangelical social priorities. I think this is a grave error. Douglas Groothuis wrote a piece last week that is a prophetic call to evangelicals to stop listening to the siren song from the Wallis’ and the Campolo’s. I’m only going to post an excerpt here, but you should…
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Progress in Iraq
Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have dominated headlines lately because of their prolonged fight for the nomination of the Democrat Party. Both of them have downplayed progress in Iraq as a part of their justification for rapid troop withdrawals should either of them become president.
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Proportional Representation Bedevils the Democrats
Former Senator Tom Daschle squared-off against Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell on “Meet the Press” today. Daschle made the case for Obama, and Rendell for Clinton. The ironic thing is that Rendell seems to have the stronger argument—that Clinton should receive the Democrat nomination for president despite winning fewer delegates than Obama. Watch it for yourself and see if you agree about the strength of Clinton’s case for the nomination. One this is clear. The Democrats are having a problem with proportional representation in their primary and caucuses. If the primaries and caucuses would have been winner-take-all contests, the Democrats would have settled on their candidate by now. And that candidate…
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Schwarzenegger Vows To Protect Homeschooling in California
In response to the outrageous appellate court decision issued earlier this week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vowed to protect homeschooling in California. I’m including this story in the links list of my previous post. But since his remarks are an extremely important development, I reproduce them here: “Every California child deserves a quality education, and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children. . . Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education. . . This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts, and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will.” “Governor…
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NRO: An Open-Letter to Senator Obama
Sherif Girgis is a senior philosophy major at Princeton University who recently wrote the following open-letter to Senator Barack Obama. Girgis gets right to the heart of the matter on the life issue, and the implicit critique of Obama is devastating. The article is posted at National Review Online.
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Obama: Sermon on the Mount supports gay civil unions
Yesterday, the Baptist Press ran a story on Barack Obama’s position on civil unions. In short, Obama says that his reading of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount leads him to support civil unions for homosexuals. Here he is in his own words: “I believe in civil unions that allow a same-sex couple to visit each other in a hospital or transfer property to each other. I don’t think it should be called marriage, but I think that it is a legal right that they should have that is recognized by the state. If people find that controversial, then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which…
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Questions for the Emerging Church about Abortion
Michael Patton questions Emerging/Emergent churchers about their attempts to downgrade the abortion issue among evangelical voters. Patton’s penetrating queries could also be addressed to Shane Claiborne, Tony Campolo, and the rest of the evangelical left. The questions are worth quoting at length:
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Barack Obama’s Audacity of Infanticide
When I wrote my previous post about Obama’s refusal to defend infant survivors of abortion, I didn’t know that former Senator Rick Santorum had just penned an opinion editorial on the same subject. Santorum uses language that is even stronger than mine. He writes: ‘Let’s be clear about what Obama did, once in 2003 and twice before that. He effectively voted for infanticide. He voted to allow doctors to deny medically appropriate treatment or, worse yet, actively kill a completely delivered living baby. Infanticide – I wonder if he’ll add this to the list of changes in his next victory speech and if the crowd will roar: “Yes, we can.”‘…
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Obama’s Barbaric Record on Abortion
The delegate-rich primaries of Texas and Ohio will happen tomorrow, and the remaining candidates have been campaigning as hard as they can in the final days before the vote. I live in Texas and have been seeing a flurry of television ads in the last week or so. I’ve also gotten telephone calls from the McCain, Huckabee, and Obama campaigns. Last week my answering machine had a pre-recorded message from Barack Obama himself. Earlier today, the Huckabee campaign called with a pre-recorded “push-poll.” But the most interesting phone-call I have received was one that came about 8:45pm on Sunday evening. It wasn’t a pre-recorded message. There was a live voice…