There are times where I am sympathetic to the secularist demands that "men of God" stay in the church and out of politics. This is an example of one of those times. For a man who claims to still have a conservative bone in his body, he has a remarkably knee-jerk reaction to anyone who criticizes his Dear Leader:
You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created.
After Obama was elected, you Republican leaders had a unique last chance to send a patriotic message of unity to the world -- and to all Americans. You could have backed our president's economic recovery plan. Since we all know that half of our problem is one of lost confidence and perception, nothing would have done more to calm the markets and project resolve and confidence than if you had been big enough to take Obama's offered hand and had work with him -- even if you disagreed ideologically. You had the chance to put our country first. You utterly failed to rise to the occasion.
Proving once again that Obama's supporters believe that their collective will to power can overcome and dominate the basic laws of economics, Schaeffer would have us believe that all the banks really needed was an injection of confidence and capital. Nevermind the fact that they found themselves in an unimaginable clusterfuck of debt created through exotic asset arrangements and strategies that even the devil himself would applaud as innovative. The Obamaniacs' strategy for recovering the economy: carpet-bomb the failing institutions with capital and forget that they were run into the ground.
At a time when the country needs a radical shift to extreme fiscal austerity on the part of the federal government, Obama wants to dramatically increase federal spending. Whatever those who came before him did doesn't justify what he is doing now. For a "man of God," what Schaeffer is defending is tantamount to declaring that two wrongs make a right. What Obama is doing is fundamentally immoral, as it is breaking the back of my generation to ease the burden on the older generations. This whole affair is nothing short of one giant celebration of rank hypocrisy.
<i>"...failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war"</i>
I suppose it would help if I knew what the heck he was talking about. What failed ideologies of the Religious Right? Does he mean Right to Life? Or working against marriage absence? Or father absence?
Same with "free market deregulation". I wish this dope had any idea what a free deregulated market would look like and how much better it would function without government distorting it. Or turning our country slowly but surely into a fascist state.
"NeoCon Love of War". Sigh. Does he realize NeoCons are really just homeless Democrats who aspire to Zionism?
Frank Schaeffer is one of those "conservatives" who thinks that Obama isn't deeply opposed to what most conservatives stand for. He's either an extremely light-weight thinker/analyzer, or he is incredibly mendacious.
Btw, did you notice the experimental new rich text editor that I added to the comment box?
I did. Pretty slick. Maybe I'll have to stop typing my own HTML now :)
I personally don't have aproblem with preachers doing politics. It took me many years to get over that whole separation of church and state thing until I came to the conclusion that it was intented to limit the power of the state, not the church. The more I am subjected to Democratic-led government, the more I appreciate what real free speech looks like. I say let him speak, and judge him on the merits of what he has to say.
I don't advocate shutting him up through government, but rather making him wish that he'd never spat on his parents' legacies the way he has by private criticism. He's the sort of systematically ignorant preacher who manages to not only add nothing, but take away a lot in the way that he wraps up his ignorance in godly language.