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I will miss him Nov 9, 2008 10:15 pm
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President Bush will soon be heading home and for many that day cannot come soon enough. Count me among those who will miss him and his bedrock decency.


He had a rough road from day one. His first inauguration struck me as a portent. I was there, shivering in the grandstands on Pennsylvania Avenue. At the exact moment the president heard "Hail to the Chief" for the first time and was announced to the audience, a sleet storm descended from the skies.

It has never let up.

Through it all Mr. Bush kept his head up and soldiered on. He took the criticism in stride. I remember riding with him in his presidential limousine to the Washington Hilton for a speech. A woman standing at an intersection directed an obscene gesture at him that I had hoped he missed. The president waved to her and with a bemused look said to me, "Did you see what she did?"

Many other Americans, particularly the "values voters" who helped elect him twice, will miss him because of what he achieved: Samuel Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court, children in schools that now are better because they are accountable, African women who now have medicines for their HIV-infected babies, and religious charities that are finally being treated by government as partners instead of rivals.

– Nicole GelinasI remember coming to the West Wing one morning before the daily 7:30 senior staff meeting and seeing Mr. Bush at his desk in the Oval Office, reading a daily devotional. I remember the look of sorrow on his face as he signed letters to the families of the fallen. When he met with recovering addicts whose lives were transformed by a faith-based program, he spoke plainly of his own humiliating journey years ago with alcohol. When a Liberian refugee broke into tears after recounting her escape to freedom in America, the president went over and held and comforted her.

Little acts behind the curtain like these inspired intense loyalty by staff members. They spoke of someone never too busy or burdened to care -- like when he took time on Air Force One to call my wife when she was sick. The president's true character rendered his media image pure caricature.

Mother Teresa was asked at the end of her life whether she was discouraged because after decades of caring for the dying and destitute in Calcutta little seemed to have changed. She replied, "No. God doesn't call me to be successful. God calls me to be faithful."

History will decide whether George W. Bush was a successful President. But he was faithful. He had a charge to keep and he kept it.

Mr. Towey was director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2002-2006.
5 Comments
cowards of BC mods Nov 9, 2008 10:04 pm
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stop messing with my pictures.
0 Comments
ker bamma slamma or why I stayed Nov 9, 2008 7:10 am
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The blogosphere is all agog, and it’s because presidential candidate Barack Obama’s home church, Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ once adopted a Black Value System that, among other things, disavows the “Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness’.”

Here are their points, written by a committee back in 1981:

1 Commitment to God
2 Commitment to the Black Community
3 Commitment to the Black Family
4 Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5 Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6 Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7 Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8 Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9 Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired 10skills available to the Black Community
11 Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions
12 Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System

Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.
An article at the oddly misnamed blog Sweetness & Light calls the church “Afro-centric, racist and Bush-hating”, and suggests that the church is “not your everyday Christian parish”. The writer intentionally misspells Obama’s name as “Osama”, so you kind of know where they’re coming from. Anonymous commenters fill in the picture even further:

That’s cute, the way the author capitalizes Black, but leaves white lower case.

Since they’ve “discredited” the story about Obama being a Muslim, they can now demonstrate what a “real Christian” he is today and highlight some of these beliefs. Obama is a racist pig. This “church” is nothing but a bunch of psychotic and intolerant kooks.

Did you notice that this “Church” is just the black Muslim cult with a name change?

If Obama indeed buys into this church’s philosophy, we have a blatantly racist presidential front runner whose first allegiance is to Africa.

Looking for salvation? White people need not apply.

I looked at the website and it stresses the Afro-centrism. CAN OBAMA SERVE A COUNTRY THAT IS NOT ALL BLACK?

If I belonged to a church that was White-centric questions would be raised about my ability to serve ALL the people!

The “Free Republic” conservative discussion forum is equally charming:

I’m not exactly sure what the “Black Value System” is. But I have a suspicion that whatever it is, it’s not too good for White Folks.

Replace Obama with an all-white candidate and change all the instances of the word “black” on this webpage to “white” and we have a candidate that couldn’t get elected dogcatcher in any community in America.

Their “black values systems” sounds divisive and racist.

They sound particularly embittered and that isn’t Christian.

Sounds like these folks have some mighty large chips on their shoulders.

For obvious reasons, I’m not providing a link to any of these sites.

What exactly is this church these anonymous people are so afraid of? Is it really “not your everyday Christian parish”? I’m afraid not. The United Church of Christ (not to be confused with the “Churches of Christ”) is about as mainstream as you can get. They are known for traditional worship services and a historical commitment to social justice.

And Trinity? They are the quintessential black Chicago church. When question came up at another Chicago church about whether there was something racist in the way a particular ritual was being planned, the question asked was, “What do they do at Trinity?” Trinity sets the standard for racially correct behavior.

In a Chicago Tribune piece, Trinity’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, talked about the formation of the South Side church :

Many black Christians were leaving the church for other religious traditions, including the Black Hebrew Israelites and the Nation of Islam, who taught that Christianity was a white man’s religion imposed on them by slaveholders.

“They didn’t know African-American history,” Wright said. “They were leaving the churches by the boatloads. The church seemed so disconnected from their struggle for dignity and humanity.”

Wright set out to show young people how other major religions also participated in the slave trade, how many abolitionists were Christians and how Jesus’ concern for the oppressed related to the struggles of the black community….

Wright sought to build on the black theology of liberation introduced in 1968 by Rev. James Cone of New York, by emphasizing Africa’s contribution to Christianity rather than that of mainstream white theologians.

“To show there is an independent form of thinking there about religion that stands on its own, that’s really more life-giving than what you get from Europe,” Cone said. “Black people who come from that approach have a very healthy understanding of who they are.”

To bolster that pride, Wright takes members of his flock to different African nations every year. Wright also encourages youths in the congregation to attend historically black colleges and universities, sponsoring a scholarship fair each year.

Obama’s reaction to the Trinity’s points?:

…Obama said it was important to understand the document as a whole rather than highlight individual tenets. “Commitment to God, black community, commitment to the black family, the black work ethic, self-discipline and self-respect,” he said. “Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement.

“So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help….”

In his published memoirs, Obama said even he was stopped by Trinity’s tenet to disavow “middleclassness” when he first read it two decades ago in a church pamphlet. The brochure implored upwardly mobile church members not to distance themselves from less fortunate Trinity worshipers.

“As I read it, at least, it was a very simple argument taken directly from Scripture: `To whom much is given much is required,’” Obama said in the interview.

But Obama scoffed at the suggestion that Trinity espouses a value system that seeks to help blacks exclusively. “If I say to anybody in Iowa–white, black, Hispanic or Asian–that my church believes in the African-American community strengthening families or adhering to the black work ethic or being committed to self-discipline and self-respect and not forgetting where you came from, I don’t think that’s something anybody would object to.

So what’s the bottom line? It looks to me like Barack Obama is the only person exercising any leadership here.

Trinity needs to re-evaluate their points. Has nothing changed since 1968? When I returned from the Middle East after 9/11, whites were telling me “everything has changed; ‘they’ are not the enemy any more”. And with increasing numbers of blacks moving to the suburbs, the young have become more intolerant of social separation based on race. But let’s face it, whites know a whole lot more about blacks than blacks know about whites. While no one would argue with the continued need for blacks to strengthen their community, (well, almost no one) it’s time for them to stop being so nearsighted and look to their nation and the world. Has there really been no original black thought since MLK? Are they just going to keep re-reading King’s old speeches, and recycling decades-old ideas, or are they going to do some critical thinking and write some new ones? What have they learned on their trips to Africa? I’m serious. If they can write a “black value system”, they should be able to write a global value system as well. They should be able to devote some small fraction of their energy to providing leadership, not just for their own insular community, but for the nation.

It’s time for Trinity to form a new committee.
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Its happened before Nov 9, 2008 7:05 am
141 Views
Jonah Goldberg

October 30, 2008

There's an old saying: The oldest word in American politics is "new." Only in that sense is there anything new to Barack Obama.

Obama prefers the word "progressive" to "liberal" because it makes it sound like he's shedding old liberal ideas. But if he is, it's only to embrace older ones.

America first encountered the vision Obama espouses under Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president and the first to openly disparage the U.S. Constitution as a hindrance to enlightened government. His new idea was to replace it with a "living constitution" that empowered government to evolve beyond that document's constraints. The Bill of Rights, lamented the progressives, inhibited what the government can do to people, but it failed to delineate what it must do for people.

The old conception of individualism needed to be replaced by a new system in which the citizen would "marry his interests to the state," in Wilson's words. This would allow the state to fulfill the progressive pledge to "spread the prosperity around." Obama shares Wilson's faith in a living constitution and has argued that Supreme Court judges should be confirmed based on their empathy for the downtrodden.

In a vital essay in the current Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kesler notes that Obama mentions Franklin Roosevelt in his book, "The Audacity of Hope," more times than any living Democratic politician. That's not surprising, given that FDR--a veteran of the Wilson administration--carried the progressive vision of government much further than Wilson himself.

In 1944, FDR proposed updating the Bill of Rights with a new "economic bill of rights" that would define freedom not as liberty from government intrusion but as the possession of goodies provided by government. "Necessitous men are not free men," FDR proclaimed. It's a statement Obama surely agrees with; his adviser, Cass Sunstein, wrote a book saying FDR's "second bill of rights" should become the defining principle of American politics.

Wilson, Roosevelt and now Obama--all their ideas sprung forth from the work of John Dewey, the most important liberal philosopher of the 20th Century. Dewey held that "natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology," and that "organized social control" via a "socialized economy" was the only means to create "free" individuals. Dewey proposed that statism be taught as a kind of civic religion in our schools so that Americans could be raised to see the government as the solution to all of our problems.

Dewey lives on in the education reform ideas espoused by former Weatherman William "Bill" Ayers. Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, often invokes Dewey when justifying his own dream of indoctrinating public school students in "social justice." Obama doesn't condone Ayers' '70s-era bombings, but he certainly subscribes to Ayers' educational vision. In fact, Ayers' educational work is the primary defense for the candidate's association with an unrepentant terrorist.

Much has been made of Obama's comment to "Joe the Plumber" that things are better when we "spread the wealth around." The Obama campaign has rebuffed charges of "socialism" or "radicalism" with the usual eye-rolling.

But Obama's words that day in Ohio were consistent with his past statements.

A just-unearthed 2001 interview with Obama on Chicago public radio reveals as much. Then a law school instructor and state legislator, Obama offered an eloquent indictment of the Warren Court for not being radical enough. While the court rightly gave blacks traditional rights, argued Obama, "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth." Unfortunately, according to Obama, "it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution."

Officially, Obama says he is not advocating single-payer health care. That would seem too un-moderate. But in 2003, Obama told the AFL-CIO, "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program. . . . But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House."

Note: If Obama wins next week, all three of his preconditions will have been met, and his colleagues in the House and Senate are itching like junkies for a new New Deal. Only in a country of amnesiacs could one claim that socialized medicine is a "new idea."

Blowing away the dust and cobwebs from ancient wares doesn't make them new. Save for his skin color, Obama doesn't represent anything novel. Rather, he symbolizes a return to an older vision of the United States that was seen as the "wave of the future" eight decades ago.

I for one have no desire to go back to that future.

Jonah Goldberg is an editor at National Review Online.
4 Comments
Go Melanie! Nov 9, 2008 7:03 am
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McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies.

Obama stands for the expiation of America’s original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Melanie Philips
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Were the early Americans wrong? Nov 9, 2008 6:56 am
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Why did our for fathers come here in the first place? They wanted freedom from tyrany. To hear some on here, they would be way out of place to fight for the freedom from England. In their way of thinking, America should never have come to place.

Were they praying for the tyranists as they were fighting for their freedom? I think not. Were the Christians in Russia that were dying and being persecuted praying for protection and freedom or were they praying for their leaders that hated God and hated them for believing.

I pray for my country. To wake up. The enemy is at the helm. He says he feels the constitution is a hinderance to him and what he wants to do. The same one that he is called to uphold.

Either they were right for what they did or they were wrong.
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