Tag Archives: Obama

Bonhoeffer and Obama

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Eric Metaxas has just published the first biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in forty years: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. This review at Fox News has an illuminating quote from Metaxas that should sound alarm bells in the age of Obama:

But the legacy that Bonhoeffer leaves future generations is of the untold dangers of idolizing politicians as messianic figures. Not just in the 1930s and ’40s, but today as well.

“It’s a deep temptation within us,” says Metaxas. “We need to guard against it and we need to know that it can lead to our ruin. Germany was led over the cliff, and there were many good people who were totally deluded.”

Bonhoeffer, says Metaxas, was a prophet. He was a voice crying in the wilderness. He was God’s voice at a time when almost no one was speaking out against the evil of the Nazis.

For further reading on Bonhoeffer:

Here is the International Bonhoeffer Society’s English language page, and here is a good article by a member of that society.  Here is a general biographical article from the Wikipedia.  Here is a list of his books, many of which have a limited preview available.  Here is a short selection from his most famous work, The Cost of Discipleship.  And here is the poem, “Who Am I?”

Capture or Kill, War or Crime

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In a “Washington Post” story today it was reported that under President Obama there are more targeted killings than captures in counter-terrorism efforts.  Senator Bond (R, Mo) says: “Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused.”

I’m confused too.  If terrorism is going to be treated by this administration as a crime rather than an act of war, and if those captured are going to be treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants, then isn’t it a crime, the crime of murder, to just kill them without a trial?  Let me get this straight.  We kill them so that we don’t have to worry about Mirandizing them and finding a place to hold a trial if we capture them?

How long can we maintain this kind of cognitive dissonance?  If the Left wants to try G.W. Bush for war crimes, does that mean we would try President Obama for murder?

Stephanopoulos Blinked

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Rarely do the press actually ask President Obama any hard questions, but yesterday on ABC’s “This Week” George Stephanopoulos actually did.  He challenged President Obama’s support of the individual mandate within health reform legislation as a tax.  Obama was having none of it.  Here’s a relevant part of the transcript.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. That’s not true, George. The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I’m not covering all the costs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy…

OBAMA: No, but — but, George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase. Any…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s the…

OBAMA: What — what — if I — if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that’s not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don’t want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but…

OBAMA: …what you’re saying is…

STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy. You know that.

Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we’re going to have an individual mandate or not, but…

It most certainty is a tax increase.  “The Wall Street Journal” has a good analysis of this, but rather than follow through Stephanopoulos pulled his punch.  The key part of the exchange was here:

OBAMA: George, you — you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.

At this point, Stephanopoulos should have said: “No, Mr. President.  The fact that I looked it up indicates that I am not just ‘making up the language,’ as you said,  but that I am using the word correctly.”  Instead Stephanopoulos blinked and put it off on Obama’s critics and gave the President an out that allowed him to once again mischaracterize his political opponents.

Related Stories: Obama’s Media Offensive, Karl Rove, “The Washington Post”

Greatest Salesman in the World?

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There’s a story in “The Washington Post” this morning about President Obama’s meeting with House Republicans yesterday.

As the president met with House Republicans yesterday in the Capitol basement, Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) got out his BlackBerry and started to Twitter. “President Obama is speaking to House Republicans right now on Democratic stimulus bill,” he wrote on the social networking Web site. “Good salesman, bad product.”

Flake, stopped in a basement corridor as he departed the room, expanded on his Twitter report. “He’s reaching out, he’s genuine about it,” he said of the new president, but “it’s like trying to sell a Ford Pinto.”

That’s an apt description.  Obama is an exceptional salesman pushing a horrible product and millions are lining up to buy it.  In politics, the losing side is always claiming that they didn’t do a very good job of communicating their message.  It never seems to occur to anyone that we understood the message loud and clear; we’re just not buying.

That’s because in our over-commercialized society we believe everything is about sales.  I can’t count the times in my life when I mentioned to others that I am not interested in Sales and they say something to the effect that “Everything is Sales.”

Some years back I got into a heated debate with a friend in Sales who told me that if a product failed it was the fault of the Sales team.  I agreed that it could be but that it didn’t have to be.  VCRs didn’t die out because of an ineffective marketing strategy, for example.  In fact, VHS beat Beta in the video format war for a variety of reasons, some having to do with marketing strategy, but it wasn’t marketing that caused VHS to decline; it was for the same reason you don’t see buggy whip factories anymore: Obsolesce.

Superior salesmanship will only bolster a bad product for so long.  In our everything-is-sales world there is a phenomena that doesn’t fit.  It’s like “the structures of scientific revolutions” in which anomalies that don’t fit the model add up and eventually lead to a paradigm shift.  How do we account for the fact that sometimes growth happens with bad salesmanship?

While there is much that is useful in the various movements that help church growth using more modern techniques, the church is in desperate need of a paradign shift.  The Gospel never becomes obsolete, and it’s not a product to be sold.  It is a relationship to be lived.

Witness John the Baptist.  People flocked to this gaunt, bearded, wild looking man of the desert dressed in camel hair.  What was his message? “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near.” (Matt 3:2)  He goes on to say in Matt 3:11-12  “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Speaking of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, the Messiah, not the Great Salesman, what was His message?  In Luke 14: 26-27 Jesus proclaims “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Whoever does not hate his family can not be my disciple!  Whoever doesn’t carry his cross—keeping in mind that in the context of Roman occupation, this meant going to your death—whoever does not carry his cross can not be my disciple!  Whoever doesn’t give up all of his possessions can not be my disciple! (14:33)  Give up the things you love, the people you love and go die.

No wonder G.K. Chesterton once observed that “Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.”  Give up the things you love, the people you love and go die.   Maybe we should put that on our marquee and watch the crowds come pouring in.

But the thing is, if we take a look at the verse before all this (14:25) we find: “Now large crowds were traveling with him.”  This is a jarring incongruity to the modern media and market driven mind.  Can you imagine a Nike campaign that said “Our latest shoe will pinch your toes, rub your heels and cost a lot of money”?  No one would buy it, and yet people flocked to Jesus.

What was Jesus offering that was so good that people wanted to follow Him if that was His message?  He was offering them nothing less than Himself.  They wanted to be near Him.  They wanted to hear Him.  And they wanted to be like Him.

In the words of Bruce Carroll: “Wounded people everywhere, and when they look at us, do they see Jesus there? Who Will be Jesus to them? Who’ll show the love that restores them again?”

Let us not forget that it was through a rag-tag band of fishermen, tax collectors, lowly outcasts that Jesus changed the world, not a crew of highly trained executive account managers and salesmen.

Obama can pitch a bad product with style and poise, charisma and charm.  Let the Church keep pitching a Carpenter for King no matter how awkward, ugly, incompetent and old fashioned we may be.

Obects of History

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Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked On-Line, wrote what is probably the most perceptive essay on the Obama phenomena that I have seen:

So there was a dual historic element to the inauguration: there was the real history of it, but more powerfully still there was the projection of a yearning for history on to it, the semi-official and on-the-ground transformation of the inauguration into a clear, unambiguous, internationally recognisable dividing line between then and now, between the old cynical order and something new, between who we were yesterday and who we are today. Ironically, this intense Historification of the inauguration, driven by people’s desire for a sense of purposeful destiny, ended up exposing the absence of genuine history-making today. In the past, people tended to tell stories about what they did during major historic events (as captured in the age-old question ‘What did you do in the war, daddy?’), while the question of ‘where were you?’ was confined to one-off, freak occurrences that took us by surprise (‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot? When Diana died?’). Today, the rush to ‘participate’ in Obama’s inauguration simply to say ‘I was there’ captures the view of history as something that we observe, something that is done on our behalf by other people, something we can be at but not really part of.

Indeed, watching the inauguration yesterday – both the historic and Historic versions – one could be forgiven for forgetting that it was the American people themselves who made this event happen. Increasingly, Obama is discussed not as someone who was elected by the masses, mandated to govern the United States, but as someone who ‘arrived’, who ‘came’, who ‘emerged when we most needed him’. As Maya Angelou put it, ‘And out of [our] great need, I believe he came. Barack Obama came’. There is a religious twist to this view of Obama ‘coming’, and it also strikingly reveals the absence of, or at least the weakness of, a sense of human agency in the Obama phenomenon. The inauguration confirmed both that millions of people want meaningful change but also that they feel incapable of bringing such change about – so they invest all of their hopes and aspirations on to one man instead; one man who, as a woman in DC said when interviewed by a journalist on what Obama should do next, is expected to ‘do everything’. Fundamentally, and contradictorily, Obama represents both people’s urgent and positive desire for a new way of governing, and also their feeling of atomisation, their sense of being the objects rather than the subjects of history.