Here are just a few additional thoughts on the Biden/Palin debate. I will not say a lot about Biden, who came off as fairly experienced and just this side of sleazy. He clearly had lots of facts and figures at his fingertips, but, on the down side, many of them were wrong. If Palin had jumbled the Middle East the way he did, she’d be out of the race by now. But for mysterious reasons, he gets a bye. Oh, well.
The only time when Palin was visibly talking nonsense was when she was answering the question about climate change. This was because she was in the minefield of nonsense orthodoxy, and to talk sense in such a circumstance is a mortal sin. She clearly knew that, and so she wandered around aimlessly a bit. That part was difficult to watch.
But there were other problems, not having to do with her competence or intelligence, but rather with her position. For example, she repeatedly went after Wall St. “greed,” which is a good thing for preachers to go after. I am preaching on Psalm 49 tomorrow, and I will be going after it. But whenever politicians go after it, all they do is create regulatory mechanisms for the next round of greedy businessmen to manipulate at will. The very best way to address business greed in the public sector is to insist that the greedists, and those foolish enough to do business with them, be required to eat their own cooking.
Capitalism in good times and safety net socialism in hard times is not capitalism. Capitalism is not riding the bubble until it bursts, and then to suddenly discover the need for government intervention “from time to time.” Graspers and grabbers need to be hit a whole lot harder than the Feds will ever hit them. Yeah, greed on Wall St. was a big problem. Let gravity deal with it.
On homosexual marriage, I thought Palin deftly turned the tables on Biden. Though it looked like they were saying the same thing, they were not at all. Palin said that marriage was for a man and a woman, period, and everyone believes her. Biden said the same, but nobody does. That is why the homo activists are not yelling for Biden’s head right now. They are (all of them) just biding their time. And Palin said that homosexuals should be allowed to leave things in their wills to whomever they please, and to visit whomever they want to in the hospital. Well, look at me. I think that too, and so does Biden. But he wants that in a way that would lead to civil unions that in turn pave the way to homo marriage later. Palin’s interest in all that appears to be more libertarian, as mine would be. You don’t need to have civil unions or marriages in order to have the civil right to throw fabulous parties for one another. Everybody has that civil right now.
As I have argued before, my driving issue is Roe v. Wade. The only reason I am even thinking about voting for McCain/Palin is that she is “no exceptions” pro-life and she will be the reason McCain wins, if he does. I have said before that I thought that McCain was going to walk away with this election. That was before the Wall Street meltdown, which has certainly altered the game, and has made me significantly less sure of that. At the same, while cheerfully admitting that this could well be wrong, I still think that McCain is going to take it. But if he takes this election, I believe that everyone will know that he owes his victory to Sarah Palin. In that context, I think a double-cross Supreme Court appointment would be unlikely. And if one or two more sane heads make it onto the Court, then Roe would go down, and that would be the basic turnaround I am looking for.
If Obama wins, then that will be what believing Bible students would call a holy cow moment. I for one will be scurring around the top decks, battening every hatch I can find. The only bright spot I can envisage is that among evangelicals all the silly and trendy critics of American empire will shut right up. American empire will continue to get all swoll up under Obama, but their prophetic voice will suddenly get laryngitis — because it turns out that leftist empire was apparently was Amos was really after. So that will be one small comfort at any rate.
Incidentally, I believe that if Roe goes down, following a McCain election, the way it would happen is by allowing states to restrict abortion, which most will do. California and New York and others would not, but most will. That will drive the cultural wedge deeper, and the slow suicide of the deep blue states will accelerate. What happens to societies where murdering the future is thought of as a constitutional right? They continue to circle the drain, and then they start picking up speed as the circles get tighter.
Now given what was at stake for the Court in this election, it was striking to me that Palin was not called on in this debate to defend her pro-life position, and Biden was not called on to articulate his pro-choice position. There are two reasons why this might have been the case. The first, highly unlikely, is that the Establishment knows that McCain/Palin will not really attack Roe in any significant way, and they are happy to let them sucker the pro-lifers in this election. But given how the rabid Left thinks, I don’t believe they are capable of going this way, even if it were true, which it almost certainly isn’t. They think that anybody to the right of Hillary Clinton is a Nazi, and that kind of mind is not really capable of nuance.
The second reason, and this is what I think is going on, is that Palin has the same ability that Ronald Reagan had to do a complete end run around the established media gatekeepers. During the debate, she winked at the American people, for crying out loud. To give her a chance to speak on a motivating issue like that, where her personal credibility is high, would have been way too much of a soft pitch. Why will a pitcher sometimes walk a batter? Because the stakes are too high to let them swing.