The Party of Death

With Roe v. Wade day coming up, it is a time for bloggers everywhere to be weighing in with some thoughts about abortion.  Unfortunately, I already did that, purely by coincidence, two days ago, reflecting on some of the occasional unsavory excesses of the pro-life movement (for a chilling reminder, though, of the moral gravity of abortion in America, it's worth reading Al Mohler's post today, “Abortion is as American as Apple Pie”).

The greatest problem with evangelical politics today, however, is not that it is too pro-life but that it is not pro-life enough.  This is hardly a novel observation, having become a slogan of sorts for more leftward-leaning evangelicals, who would like to see a Christlike commitment to peace become part of Christian politics in America.  But the extent of the Christian Right's myopia has become glaringly obvious in this election cycle, which has been summed up for me (no doubt unfairly) in two memorable moments: (1) The cheers of a debate crowd when a moderator asked Rick Perry about the 234 death-row inmates he had executed as governor of Texas (which I blogged about last October), and (2) The crescendoing boos of a debate crowd (made up of my fellow Bible Belt South Carolinians) when Ron Paul said earlier this week, "Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: we shouldn't do to other countries what we don't want to have them do to us."  

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Three More Reasons to Ditch the GOP

Unbearable as the experience often is, I can't resist peeking in on news related to the Republican presidential nomination race from time to time, and each time, it seems, I find another damning testimony which reveals how tenuous the connection between the GOP and anything recognizably Christian is becoming.  Perhaps it is now not so much the party of the "Christian Right" as the "Cold-Hearted Pelagian Right."  Here are three examples I've saved from the stories of the past couple weeks:

The new media favourite of the race, Herman Cain, whose chief qualification for governing the most powerful nation on earth seems to be that he ran a pizza chain once, had this to say about the recent Wall Street protests: "Don't blame Wall Street.  Don't blame the big banks. If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. . . . It is not a person's fault because they succeeded. It is a person's fault if they failed. And so this is why I don't understand these demonstrations and what is it that they're looking for."  

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Some Thoughts on Obama: A Follow-up

My recent post bothered some people, which was, I suppose, to some extent inevitable; but some of that could have been avoided, and I must take the blame for that.  If you were bothered by the melodrama, then you may be on the wrong blog, since for me, it's hardly worth writing about unless it's worth getting a tad dramatic about (perhaps I read too much Shakespeare in my adolescence).  But if you thought that some of the rhetoric about Tea Party Republicans, particularly the line about tactics of "disgraceful depravity or delusionality," was perhaps overblown, and indeed, calculated to heighten the polarisation that the post laments, then that is a fair complaint, and for that I apologise.  I should also re-emphasise that of course I consider that there's still plenty of blame to put on everyone else involved, and that during Bush's days, many Democrats resorted to equally childish tactics at times--the only difference is that they weren't risking such a disaster.

But the most bothersome part, I think, was a paragraph that could easily be quite misread--my paragraph on Obama.  So since I've decided to come out of my insulated British closet and say what I really think of American politics, I might as well say what I really think about Obama.

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NYT on the Republican Deficit Plan

This afternoon on Yahoo Finance I found an NYT article by David Leonhardt offering pretty much the same criticism of the "Pledge to America" that I offered below in "Delusions of a Prodigal Nation"--only they have good quotes and good statistics and good journalism to liven it up.  It's well-worth a read.  "Congressional Republicans have used the old trick of promising specific tax cuts and vague spending cuts," Leonhardt laments.  It pretends that cutting out a little fat from a few wasteful programs will do the trick, but

The bulk of the deficit problem instead comes from three popular programs, Medicare, Social Security and the military, and they happen to be the ones the Republican pledge exempts from cuts. But it’s impossible to fix the deficit without making cuts to these programs or raising taxes. To suggest otherwise is to claim that 10 minus 1 equals 5.

"In short," Leonhardt summarizes, "the pledge imagines a world without tough choices, where we can have low taxes, big government and a balanced budget."

Delusions of a Prodigal Nation

We've all heard the news about the GOP's new "Pledge to America," which states, more or less, "We pledge allegiance to the Tea Party, and to the millions of voters for which it stands, and promise to do whatever it says."  No, it doesn't really say that, but of course, it's no secret that the Republicans are tripping over themselves to try to align themselves with, rather than against, the wave of far-right hysteria the Tea Party represents.  The basic message of this movement is to say, "No to taxes" categorically, "No to government spending" rather vaguely, and "No to deficits" as an afterthought.  Taxes, we are told, are at unacceptable levels--never mind that they are lower than they have been in decades (whereas the highest marginal tax rate under the conservative Eisenhower was 91%, now it's only 36%!).  And never mind that income inequality has shot to unprecedented levels, with the richest Americans increasing their incomes even in the midst of recession, and with the top 20% now accounting for 49.4% of all income, making it hard to see on what basis one could oppose higher marginal tax rates.  

So, we must balance the budget without increasing taxes, we are told.  This will be easy, the Pledge to America assures us, with a vague wave of its hand promising $100 billion in spending cuts by getting rid of wasteful government spending.  But that won't be enough--assuming that Congress does defy the Tea Party and let the Bush tax cuts expire for the top two income brackets, then, if we don't want to raise any more taxes, we will need $255 billion per year in spending cuts to achieve a balanced budget by 2015, which is pretty much a fiscal necessity.  How hard is it to cut $255 billion per year?  A new study by the Center for American Progress reveals the bleak answer.  

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