Benedict Option Endorsed by National Newspaper

...or, I don't know, is The Onion international? Either way, a wise Soup Ladeler interviewed by the premium press outlet had this to say about Christianity's future with young, cool people:

“Yeah, but as soon as the church is obscure and hip again they’ll come rushing back.”

Some people try to make Christianity more relevant by accepting various disordered yet fashionable lifestyles like homosexuality. Other people try to make it more relevant by withdrawing from society and into a to-be-defined type of bunker. One might be morally worse, but neither ends up working.

Hey-ey, I, oh, oh I'm still alive...

I'm still alive, just on a new project and up to my neck. Props to Keith and all y'all for keeping stuff going on EQE.

Thought this was an insightful comment from an admitted liberal anonymous commenter (LibAnon) regarding why Rod Dreher rubs him/her the wrong way. The comment continues in the following section here. I'll remark on several excerpts, then I have to bolt.

....I was bullied pretty mercilessly for a while as a kid - in a Catholic school. But I've largely moved on with life. Sure, I despise bullies and authoritarians in general, but I tend to function decently well.

Rod doesn't. Rod's a perpetually aggrieved teenager in a pushing-50-something's body. Rod keeps an enemies' list far longer than Nixon's and nurses his grudges like precious children. The world has failed Rod, and Rod is going to make the world pay. It's all about Rod.

Most people who are bullied do move on with life. That's why I wonder if the new emphasis on bullying isn't caused somewhat by a fixation on it. It might be even more important to get over bullying episodes in the long run than "standing up" to the bully. I always imagine the kids who bullied me in school as working as lackeys in quick oil change garages and as farmhands in the middle of Bum-fudge-egypt. And I'm sure I'm right.

Think about the trajectory of his life since he's been online (which, thanks to his ridiculous personal oversharing, one can get a good sense of). He went to Dallas to do editorial work, but the newspaper industry started to go belly-up. This is the age of his Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet. Irritating to some, I found it fascinating. Sure, he was a little touchy, but seemed somewhat well-adjusted.

Then he goes to Philadelphia to edit the Templeton Foundation's new online magazine. He immediately runs into trouble because, shockingly, the Templeton people don't seem to appreciate a stream of posts about loose women rather than, you know, WHAT THEY WERE ALL ABOUT. Also, the OCA Orthodox churches (Religion Number 3, for those keeping score) don't fit Rod's standards. So, he passive-aggressively manages to get himself fired from his supposed dream job editing a magazine about the mysteries of the universe because he can't stop being snarky online (this time over some church dispute).

I think the man's peak was the Templeton Foundation gig. The guy had arrived and he didn't realize it. His pessimism got the better of him and all he could see were the things which were wrong with it.

You notice less and less about Rod's blissful family life (which he wrote a lot about in Dallas, which makes its absence all the more noticeable). The good Mrs. Dreher barely appears at all anymore.

Everyone keeps failing Rod. His idol, Wendell Berry, fails him earlier this year, and he turns upon him with a fury that makes me think Rod was looking for an excuse to unburden himself of that old man (who is far more influential than Rod will ever be). He goes the Mel Gibson route and founds the Church of Rod (affiliated with ROCOR, but pretty much Rod's personal kingdom) because the Orthodox churches in Baton Rouge aren't pure enough for him - Religion Number 4. His triumphant return to the town of his birth does not seem to be regarded so triumphantly by those he left behind - they're not lining up to kiss his posterior the way he imagines they should. He gets testier and testier, to the point that commenters on his own blog start posting their concern for Rod's emotional state.

I pointed out at the time that Wendell Berry's attack on Christian morality should not have surprised anyone. But I think Liberal Anonymous is correct to point out that Dreher's response to Berry's betrayal has has a "you-have-failed-me" tinge to it.

As we always like to say, read the whole thing. I don't necessarily agree with the characterization 100%; I think everyone tends to feel more like they've been failed by public figures than admitting their folly in trusting them to be their spokespeople. That's why our friend, Tom, is always quoting the Bible with "Put not your trust in Princes." Plus pointing fingers gets easier the more you do it. But it does seem like Dreher may be "failed" more often than most due to the remarkably bad judgment with regard to those with whom he throws in his lot, e.g., Abp. Gandalf, Met. Jonah, Wendell Berry and Wick Allison and his crazy crew at The American Conservative, which LibAnon rightly terms a "sinking ship".

One more insightful observation I will point out that LibAnon makes is the blogging less and less about "blissful family life". It does seem like this feature has fallen off as of late. But this is not necessarily due to a decline in bliss. Maybe the man is just wising up about the dangers of oversharing.

Pre-apology Propaganda

Guess who came up with some of the most damning material on Obama's "If you like your plan" lie? The White House!



I have a computer, not a "lot of free time." But I have common sense. Plus an insurance plan that doubled in price. Raising your costs because of onerous regulations isn't being a bad apple. It's called "staying in business".

Obama's weak apology is far too wordy, just like every time he talks. He should have just said, "I misspoke. What I meant to say was if *I* like your plan, then you get to keep your plan."

Not many people want Obama's health insurance

UK Daily Mail has the exclusive: Less than 1% of visitors are signing up for Obamacare on state health exchange websites. Here's the summary:

• California's program registered an estimated 0.58 per cent of website visitors in its first day
• Obama administration won't say how many Americans signed up on the central website that covered insurance exchanges for 36 states
• Kentucky's 5.3 per cent application rate seems to be the nation's highest
• Other states wouldn't provide statistics, or tracked only the creation of new online accounts, not numbers of completed applications

I have a friend who really is poor and doesn't have health insurance. He basically works as a handyman, maybe makes $20,000.00 a year. His wife gets disability, SSI or whatever. He's the perfect candidate for some type of government insurance program like Obamacare supposedly offers. But I don't think he's ever even been on the web, and he's not going to sign up. You have to go after people like that, but the government doesn't work that way. They don't really care about people like my friend.

This part cracks me up:

Millions want to get covered,' according to the Obamacare system's main Twitter account on Wednesday afternoon.

'Americans across the country – millions of Americans – are taking advantage of the opportunity to shop for affordable health insurance that they could not attain before now,' White House Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted on Monday.

But without enrollment figures, it's impossible to know whether Obamacare is seeing a flood of new customers or just a trickle.

The White House did not respond to a request for those numbers.

Not ready to brag yet I guess. Don't forget to give them another hit.

President Obama knew that Planned Parenthood doesn't offer mammograms

H/T Breitbart.

The official statement from Live Action President Lila Rose, following the second presidential debate last night:

"President Obama continues mislead Americans in his defense of the abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Live Action conducted an investigation last year that demonstrated that Planned Parenthood does not perform mammograms. The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed in June, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, that not a single Planned Parenthood in the nation has mammography equipment. Planned Parenthood is spending millions to preserve its place at the taxpayer trough and re-elect the president. It's no wonder that the president used the debate as a promotion vehicle for Planned Parenthood's lies."



How could Obama not know this after HHS confirmed it last year? It's all part of the narrative. Mitt Romney kills women with breast cancer and Planned Parenthood saves women from breast cancer.

Here come the Bishops! Here come the Bishops!

Remember how we use to continually be amazed by the phenomenon of everything reminding Rod Dreher of the malfeasance of Roman Catholic Bishops? Well, nothing has changed. The piece starts out quoting Thomas Frank on financial crises and impending economic doom. Then in the midst, out of nowhere, we get this:

Isn’t that how nearly all our elite institutions work? Isn’t that why not a single Roman Catholic bishop — save, arguably, Boston’s Cardinal Law — lost his post as a result of the abuse scandal? United we stand, or divided we hang.

And then, laughably, he writes this in the conclusion.

I think many of us must imagine these people sitting in their Ivory Towers of government, academia, media, banking, etc., and making decisions they consciously know are wrong, or corrupted. Maybe some do, but the key point here is that many, even most, of them don’t realize at the time how social, emotional, and psychological factors corrupt their own judgment.

But not your judgement, Rod, oh no.

He begins that last paragraph with a ridiculous false dichotomy that you can either be a good poor person or a bad rich person. And he's about to get a seven-figure advance for writing a book about his dead sister. Is Rod Dreher not the biggest laughingstock at this point? I, for one, feel absolutely vindicated for all the work I've done over the years in trying to expose him for the fraud he is. And Jonathan, Diane, Kathleen et al — you should all feel vindicated as well.

Charles Gasparino: Obama Building Zero Confidence

Who knows is Obama will win again. There are too many factors and too much time between now and November 2012. Charles Gasparino explains why it won't be a cake walk for the big B.O. Excerpt:

Obama's building zero confidence about the future, too. He's back to insisting on the end of the Bush tax rates after next year -- promising higher taxes on "millionaires and billionaires," meaning small businesses and families that make $250,000. And his plan to supposedly cut $4 trillion in spending over the next 12 years doesn't add up -- everyone knows it's just a pose, so he can pretend to be responsible as he fights Republican efforts to make real cuts.

As his no-drill policies help push up energy prices, his only answer is more politics -- bashing the oil companies and threatening special tax hikes on them, as if that wouldn't push up prices. For all this and more, the economy will be an albatross for Obama all the way to November 2012. He might yet win -- the weak Republican field is itself fumbling to come up with a growth agenda. But don't start the re-election parties just yet.

Redefining Patriotic

Andrew McCarthy's 'Representing' al-Qaeda is a must-read if you want to know the extent to which Eric Holder and the Obama Administration will go to blame Bush and set terrorists free. Prepare to be enraged. Excerpt:

The attorney general’s pep rally occurred just as the public was getting its first glimpse of the peculiar notions of “representation” shared by several Gitmo Bar veterans. Thanks to dogged investigative work (here and here) by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn (of, respectively, Keep America Safe and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), we now know a good deal about several of these volunteer lawyers. To take just a few examples, they provided al-Qaeda detainees with a brochure that instructed them on how to claim falsely that they had been tortured; fomented a detainee hunger strike that disrupted security and precipitated fabricated reports that prisoners had been tortured and force-fed; provided the detainees with other virulently anti-American propaganda (for example, informing them about the Abu Ghraib scandal, comparing U.S. military physicians to Josef Mengele, and labeling DOJ lawyers “desk torturers”); gave the enemy-combatant terrorists a hand-drawn map of Gitmo’s layout, including guard towers; helped the enemy combatants communicate messages to the outside world; informed the detainees of the identities of other detainees in U.S. custody; and posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.

Peter Wehner Examines and Refutes Evan Bayh's Excuses

A much needed corrective to Bayh's lame emanations about partisanship, ideology, and what comprises the "people's business". I liked the whole thing; several excerpts follow:

Actually, the people's business is getting done. In this case, "the people's business" was to stop ObamaCare, which the public opposes in significant numbers (the spread between those who oppose ObamaCare and those who support it is 15-20 percentage points). Most Americans think the Democratic health care plans are badly flawed and a majority of them want Congress to begin over again.

The dominant narrative manifests a particular cast of mind, one that equates "the people's business" with passing legislation that increases the size, cost, and reach of government. In fact, sometimes the people's business involves stopping bad ideas from becoming law.

To use an analogy, heavy machinery is safer when equipped with brakes.

It's worth recalling that the Founders set up a system of government with what James Madison called the "auxiliary precautions" of American government -- meaning the separation of powers, bicameralism, and other checks and balances. Madison, who was shipped what he called a "literary cargo" of books on history and politics by Thomas Jefferson, rigorously studied the historical record of past governments. Out of that study Madison and his colleagues decided to put the emphasis on braking mechanisms, which they thought would help preserve liberty by limiting the power of government.

Then Wehner takes on an issue near and dear to my heart: the liberal's tendency to engage in word-twisting. "[I]deology can also be another word for convictions -- and one person's 'ideologue' is another person's principled politician." That sentence sums it up better than I ever could have. He takes on the "partisanship" canard in the same way, clarifying that it's not really the issue for the critics.

Many of the greatest political figures in American history -- whether we're talking about Reagan or Roosevelt, Lincoln or King, Jefferson or Hamilton -- are recognized for substance rather than process, for their commitment to American ideals rather than bipartisanship, for what they did rather than the manner in which they did it.

Yes, more substance, please. Wehner's conclusion:

It's worth recalling that in 2005 George W. Bush made a big push to reform Social Security. I thought then, and think now, that his plan was wise and necessary. But it was also undeniably unpopular, and the effort failed. Its failure did not trigger the kind of Camus-like despair we are now seeing. No one in the commentariat argued that America was, in Joe Klein's phrase, a "nation of dodos" or that Social Security's failure could be laid at James Madison's feet.

We are not facing a governing crisis today. What we are seeing is an emerging crisis for modern liberalism. And the reason is fairly straightforward: the public, having been exposed to a liberal governing agenda for the last year, is repudiating it. Liberals cannot seem to accept that, so they are lashing out at everything else. It is unwarranted and somewhat childish; and it will only accelerate The Fall.

Italics mine. Because I think it worthy to note who are the grownups in this country and who are the perpetual whiners. It's great to learn that although James Madison's "auxillary precautions" might be a little squeaky when applied at high speed, they still grab.

[Here's a related Wehner piece from a week ago to which he alludes in passing.]

I'm telling you, she's a man

Keep America Safe: "100 Hours" from Keep America Safe on Vimeo.

Disapproval of Obamacare Hits New High

Rasmussen reports.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters nationwide now oppose the health care reform proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the highest level of opposition yet measured and includes 44% who are Strongly Opposed.

Just 43% now favor the proposal, including 24% who Strongly Favor it.