Karl Rove says his biggest mistake during the Bush years was the failure to refute the “Bush lied, people died” anti-war argument. He’s right. Even though the claim was spurious on its face, it picked up steam in the popular consciousness. After a few years, this catchy slogan became the majority view of the Iraq War. Rove argues that the failure to rebut this claim was the single biggest blunder of the Bush presidency. “We in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his…
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Ross Douthat’s Exit-Strategy
Ross Douthat’s column for the NY Times argues that victory is the only exit-strategy for the war in Afghanistan. He writes: “Here is the grim paradox of America’s involvement in Afghanistan: The darker things get and the more setbacks we suffer, the better the odds that we’ll be staying there indefinitely. “Not the way we’re there today, with 90,000 American troops in-theater and an assortment of NATO allies fighting alongside. But if the current counterinsurgency campaign collapses, it almost guarantees that some kind of American military presence will be propping up some sort of Afghan state in 2020 and beyond. Failure promises to trap us; success is our only ticket…
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Russell Moore on NPR
Russell Moore was on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” to discuss the Southern Baptist Convention’s response to the oil spill. Two weeks ago, the SBC passed a resolution calling on the government “to act determinatively and with undeterred resolve to end this crisis … to ensure full corporate accountability for damages, clean-up and restoration … and to ensure that government and private industry are not again caught without planning for such possibilities.” Moore played a key role in getting this resolution passed, and he argues on NPR that Christians have to break with conservative stereotypes to rethink the issue of creation-care. He explains: “There’s really nothing conservative — and certainly nothing evangelical…
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Gulf Oil Spill and the Evangelical Conscience
Be sure to read Russell Moore’s latest on the Gulf oil spill, “Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience.” Here’s an excerpt: “I’ve left my hometown lots of times. But never like this. Sure, I’ve teared up as I’ve left family and friends for a while, knowing I’d see them again the next time around. And, yes, I cried every day for almost a year in the aftermath of a hurricane that almost wiped my hometown off the map. But I’ve never left like this, wondering if I’ll ever see it again, if my children’s children will ever know what Biloxi was.”
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Same-sex “Marriage” and Interracial Marriage
It has become fairly common for people to make a moral equivalence between bans on interracial marriage and bans on same-sex marriage. The comparison is used to drive home the point that just as one’s race shouldn’t be used as a precondition for marriage, so neither should be same-sex pairings. Frank Beckwith has a must-read post arguing that from a legal standpoint, the analogy doesn’t hold-up. He writes:
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Why I can’t stand Libertarianism
On the most important issues, libertarianism is no better than rank liberalism, and sometimes liberalism is better. Case in point above. Here is the relevant exchange:
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Laura Bush for Gay Marriage and Pro-Choice
In her interview with Larry King Tuesday night, Laura Bush said that she is for gay “marriage.” In her own words: “When couples are committed to each other and love each other, then they ought to have, I think, the same sort of rights that everyone has… I also think it’s a generational thing…. That will come… I understand totally what George thinks and what other people think about marriage being between a man and a woman… I guess that would be an area that we disagree.” Mrs. Bush also talked about a 2001 interview Katie Couric about abortion. On the day of President Bush’s 1st inauguration, Couric asked Mrs.…
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President Nominates Elena Kagan
Here’s the video of the nomination ceremony earlier today. My thoughts on the nomination are here.
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Liberal Dependence on Abortion
Ross Douthat makes some important observations about abortion in red states vs. blue states in today’s New York Times. He writes: “Liberals sometimes argue that their preferred approach to family life reduces the need for abortion. In reality, it may depend on abortion to succeed. The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah. “So it isn’t just contraception that…
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Obama To Name Kagan to Supreme Court
NBC News reports that President Obama will nominate U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to serve as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Who is this nominee? MSNBC.com has “The Skinny on Elena Kagan.”