How The Media Covers Christians In America

More about the SBC convention fiasco. By any reasonable reading the original "anti-alt-right" proposed resolution offered by Dwight McKissic was poorly worded, overly broad in some places and inaccurately specific in others. The annual meeting didn't forward the proposed resolution on the first try and then a second try later when not many people were paying attention also failed. This is what the media was waiting for and they pounced. Here is the headline on my Yahoo! feed from "News"week writer Aidan Quigley:

Christian Leaders Refuse to Renounce White Nationalism at Southern Baptist Convention Meeting

Well, points to Aidan for his mastery of misrepresentation. As a bonus, the article was headed with this completely unrelated picture:

What does Trump have to do with this resolution? Well nothing. Is Trump a Southern Baptist? Nope. Was Trump at the annual SBC meeting? Also nope. Are there actually any Southern Baptists in that picture? Maybe but I don't see one I recognize. So why is there a pic of Trump accompanying this article? The answer is obvious. The media is trying to smear Southern Baptists as a bunch of redneck racists while undermining the Trump administration.

Trump = Steve Bannon = Alt-Right = Southern Baptist Convention

Which is great except that Steve Bannon is not alt-right by any measure nor is he claimed as part of the alt-right. I haven't seen any evidence to support that the alt-right is a significant issue in the SBC. Trump is not alt-right, and if you missed it has a Jewish daughter and is over the top in his support of Israel, not exactly a typical alt-right position.

The media doesn't care about race relations in the Southern Baptist Convention or anywhere else except as a means of selling papers, magazines and online ad revenue. This issue got media coverage because it provided an easy way for the media to take a cheap shot at conservative Christians. They got to drive some page views, make Christians look bad and then get them to jump on command.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Nothing a sincere follower of Christ can do will placate the secular Left in this country and the media is their mouthpiece and often their attack dogs. No matter how many resolutions are passed and denunciations proclaimed, they will still attack and attack and attack. The only way to make them happy is to embrace sexual perversion, reject every single Biblical norm and ultimately deny Christ. So my advice is to stop worrying about the media and start worrying about preaching the Gospel. We can't do anything to change the media's view of us but we can see real people changed by the power of the Gospel we are entrusted to preach.

More On Sarah Pulliam Bailey

I posted a pretty harsh response to Ms. Bailey and her essay on the dangerous lack of faith in the media last night. I stand by what I wrote but for a more nuanced and polite and thoughtful response check out Albert Mohler's The Briefing from yesterday.

(oops, forgot the link to Mohler initially, fixed now)

Sarah Pulliam Bailey Defends An Institution That No Longer Exists (And Probably Never Did)

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, a journalist who covers religion and who professes to be a Christian, seems angry that her fellow Christians are insufficiently obsequious toward "The Press". Her piece, Evangelicals, your attacks on ‘the media’ are getting dangerous, essentially places The Media on some sort of mystic higher level and borders on hysteria.

Why are these "attacks" by evangelicals getting "dangerous"? Because, as she starts her piece out, some deranged guy shot up a pizza place. He was (cue the ominous music) "......influenced by the book “Wild at Heart,” by John Eldredge about faith and masculinity, a popular one for some evangelicals." Um, so what? Well she never says why that was important to point out. I haven't read it but it is a hugely popular book that has sold, I assume, millions of copies. So why was it pertinent to mention it? No idea other than it is popular among some evangelicals and this guy claimed to be influenced by it. Wild at Heart has been out since 2001 and I don't recall it being linked to a guy firing his gun in a pizza place very often. So why bring it up right at the beginning of her article? The only possible reason it to impugn evangelicals who like a book by lumping them in with a deranged guy, in other words poisoning the conversation right at the outset with the people she is allegedly trying to reach. That is only the beginning of the irony.

Ms. Bailey's basic premise is that evangelicals are wrong to dismiss the "mainstream" media in favor of what she no doubt considers "fake news" sites like....cue the ominous music again....Breitbart. As an aside I literally never read Breitbart (or watch Fox News or listen for more than five minutes to Rush Limbaugh, etc.) prior to this election but now I click on every single story they post just out of spite. She then undermines her own argument by pointing out, even while trying to soften the blow, that the mainstream media has done plenty to undermine their own credibility.

To Sarah, a "professing Christian" let's remember, the newspaper is how we understand the world (emphasis mine).

I was raised in both a religious home and a newspaper home. My parents would pull out books for Bible study in the morning and plop them next to the local newspaper. The Bible and newspaper went together like cereal and milk. I grew up believing journalism was a noble profession because the best journalism is based on the relentless pursuit of truth.

Your quick dismissal of the entire “mainstream media” feels deeply inaccurate to me as a Christian and a journalist — at least the kind of Christianity I was raised on, where the newspaper informed how we understood the world. The act of doing journalism is a way to live out my faith, a way to search for and then reveal truth in the world around me.

It wasn't "quick", as if we as a group are so easily swayed that we just started reading Breitbart this year and stopped reading the New York Times on a whim. This distrust of the media has been a long, long time coming. Of course it feels "inaccurate" to someone who places an apparent inordinate amount of trust in the media and is part of that group herself. The more important point is that from what she is saying, she grew up where the newspaper had equal or at least equivalent standing with the Bible to inform our worldview. Notice in the second paragraph she goes back to the newspaper as the source of how to understand the world but the Bible doesn't make a return mention. Here is where she goes wrong. The newspaper or other sources of news help to inform us of what is happening in the world but the why things happen is the province of the Bible. I can read about terrorism in the newspaper (maybe) but for all of the pontificating about why the terrorists do what they do, from American troops in the Middle East to oil to blow-back to global warming, the real why of what they do is found in the Bible. The big, "Capital W" WHY is sin and that is central to the entire Biblical narrative, Maybe she should have put the newspaper down and picked the Bible up more often. 

Many people involved in the press and especially those in the media friendly bastions of New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago hold the media in an almost mystical regard. Let me amend that, they (ironically) hold certain traditional media outlets in the highest regard, like the New York Times, NPR/PBS and the Washington Post, as well as a rather jarring combination of far left, openly agenda driven sources like the Huffington Pot and Jon Stewart that are as far as you can get from the genteel and proper format of largely white, upper crust people in expensive suits reading the Washington Post on the Metro in D.C. while on their way to Important Jobs™ that tell people in flyover country why what they think is wrong and irrelevant.

This sort of almost religious reverence for The Media is a large reason why so many of us reject the narratives they try to force down our throats. To people like Sarah with a deep and abiding faith in the media, the media is out for Truth and Justice, acting as a check and balance against the powerful. In reality the press is not that and hasn't been for a long time. It now is a largely agenda driven media enterprise that seeks to mold and change public opinion, not in favor of objective truth but rather in favor of a certain ideological viewpoint. What is especially ironic in her essay is that she thinks that you get a broad viewpoint from the mainstream media that you don't get from "Breitbart"!

The “mainstream media” is collectively valuable because it presents a range of information and viewpoints, while the Breitbarts of the world present a singular voice to a targeted group of people.

Come on. Does anyone actually think that is true? One of the mainstream media's most respected sources is NPR and this is a radio station that has E.J. Dionne and David Brooks on for their Friday political round-up as if they represent different sides of the political spectrum but as Brooks showed in his extremely nasty and partisan commentary on Election night, he is only slightly less liberal than E.J. People like David Brooks are captive, token "conservatives" who are allowed to cluck their tongues and shake their heads sadly at the ignorance of regular conservative yokels who lack their enlightenment. 

Sarah says some stuff like this:

I sympathize with some frustrations you have, including a lack of ideological diversity within some media outlets. Some reporters have unfortunately stepped into more advocacy-oriented journalism and we’ve seen a blurring of opinion with reporting. 

Could the media do a better job of covering various topics — including religion — with nuance? Absolutely. 

But immediately dismisses them as real concerns and anyway you should stay away from Breitbart! I don't expect the media to cover religion with more "nuance" because the media for the most part considers sincere religious faith to be primitive, scary and more than a little dangerous. What Sarah apparently considers "legitimate" media is almost exclusively centered in highly secular, deeply liberal urban centers that are every bit as much in an ideological bubble as us huckleberries in rural Indiana live in.

It also bears mention that sort of like a preacher who depends on the offering plate to make his living preaching about tithing, someone who writes for the mainstream media and probably gets paid lots of money and gets a lot of exposure and fame for doing so has something of a vested interest in having evangelicals who number in the tens of millions in America buying newspapers that pick up her columns.

The press still serves an adversarial role like it used to when they were muckrackers in the early days of America but not in the way expected. Their adversary now is....me. Not specifically me but people like me, people who live outside of certain urban enclaves, who have faith, Christian faith of course, and take it seriously and not only allow but insist that it inform our decisions on matters beyond what to take to the church potluck, people who think that laws matter, that borders are necessary, that government is too big and too intrusive. We are their enemy and they are the ones who made us into adversaries. You can only mock and denigrate what people hold dear and at the same time beat them over the head with the nobility of things that are abhorrent to them for so long before they will stop spending their hard earned money to subsidize the abuse. Ask ESPN and their collapsing viewer base about that.

Ms. Bailey makes an impassioned but hollow call for people who don't think like she does to think like she does anyway because, like too many people who control the media and entertainment world, she thinks she knows better for us than we do. We aren't having it anymore. I am not having it anymore and haven't for some time. Listening to news sources that don't meet the mythical  "journalistic standards" as declared by people living in Washington and New York and Chicago isn't something I feel the slightest obligation to do and trying to guilt by association me into it by some wild attempt to link a lone disturbed individual with anyone who doesn't dutifully buy the New York Times every day is cheap, clumsy and intellectually lazy. In fact it is precisely the sort of stuff that makes people like me no longer care what people from the WaPo or Chicago Tribune think.

If you want to read someone who actually seems to get what is going on, check out this essay from right after the election at cbsnews.com by Will Rahn, The unbearable smugness of the press. His whole essay is on the money but check this part out:

The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.

This is all symptomatic of modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness. Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking “we did it” feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.

So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.

And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.

It’s a profound failure of empathy in the service of endless posturing. There’s been some sympathy from the press, sure: the dispatches from “heroin country” that read like reports from colonial administrators checking in on the natives. But much of that starts from the assumption that Trump voters are backward, and that it’s our duty to catalogue and ultimately reverse that backwardness. What can we do to get these people to stop worshiping their false god and accept our gospel?

We diagnose them as racists in the way Dark Age clerics confused medical problems with demonic possession. Journalists, at our worst, see ourselves as a priestly caste. We believe we not only have access to the indisputable facts, but also a greater truth, a system of beliefs divined from an advanced understanding of justice.

Read the whole thing and compare someone who understands the actual problem with the media is the media themselves, not "dangerous" evangelicals who don't subscribe to the newspaper anymore to Ms. Bailey. If I didn't know better I might think that Ms. Bailey's essay is not directed at her "fellow evangelicals" at all but instead was designed to soothe her fellow media types and reassert her intellectual street cred. If I didn't know better that is but then how would I know better since I don't listen to my betters in the mainstream media?

When Guns Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns

The talking heads at the New York Times penned an editorial in response to the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and it was about what one would expect from that august body: End The Gun Epidemic In America. It is an eminently forgettable screed that only serves as a self-righteous echo chamber for leftists. However some of what they wrote demands a response because it exposes not just a hatred for private gun ownership but a distressing naivete and an all too common disdain for common sense and the Constitution. Exhibit A where we treat every crime where a gun is involved as a "gun crime" even if the actual crime being committed is terrorism or gang violence.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

So according to the sages at the New York Time, the purpose of our government is to "keep us safe". That sounds great! But is it true? The framers of the document that created our Federal government explained why they were making the Constitution in the preamble. Is there a mention of safety being the "job" of our elected officials?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Notice please that something is missing. There is no mention of our elected officials keeping us "safe". The Federal government was given very limited powers to adjudicate disputes between the states, provide for a common military for the defense of the nation and generally to do collectively only what the states could not easily do separately. In fact the Founders were highly suspicious of an armed government, having fought a war against the British and their standing army. They didn't write the Constitution creating the Federal government to keep us safe from criminals, they wrote the Constitution and intentionally limited the Federal government to keep Americans safe from that same government. This is Civics 101. The New York Times (All the news liberal opinion that's fit to print!) editors apparently skipped the day in class when the formation of the Constitiution was discussed. The Times continues with an unusual display of honesty:

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

I wonder if they hold the same opinion of the right to an unfettered press? What if Donald J. Trump becomes President and decides that some news stories and opinion pieces like this one are dangerous and need to be controlled via "reasonable regulation"? One can imagine the outcry of "Freedom of the press!" from the New York Times. If you can count on anything besides death and taxes, it is that the news media have a schizophrenic relationship with the Constitution, defending with their dying breath certain parts of the First Amendment but ignoring or discounting entirely the very next Amendment. To the media the only truly important part of the Bill of Rights is the freedom for them to print drivel without regulation. The rest doesn't matter much. The Times goes on:

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

Riiiiigggghhhhtttt. If you have half a brain and even the most rudimentary powers of reasoning you will see the problem right away. Expecting to eliminate gun violence by, at first, outlawing certain types of guns and then relying on the goodness of law abiding citizens to turn them in means that the only people who are giving up "assault weapons" or other firearms decreed "bad" by the Times are people who obey the law. As it turns out, those sorts of people are not the criminals who use these weapons in the commission of a crime by definition. In the Fascist fantasyland where the Times editorial board lives, would-be terrorists and criminals will glumly line up to turn in their weapons. "Shucks, I wuz gunna shoot up an office party but I have to turn in my assault weapon." In real life that is not going to happen. One of the truths about the New York Times that makes it useless for national discourse is that it thinks that only people in New York, and to a much lesser extent Boston, Chicago and L.A., have opinions that matter. If the editors of the New York Times ever lowered themselves to listen to people in "fly over" country they would realize that calls to turn in guns is a joke. I am not turning in my firearms and no one else I know would either. In fact the response would be kind of like this (the Persians in this case being the Federal government)

What is truly insidious about this is that the Times and other liberal anti-2nd Amendment types is that they are not in favor of eliminating guns, just eliminating guns in the hands of private citizens. Federal agents in possession of firearms are great because they need those guns to make citizens obey every whim of the government, no matter how asinine or counter-productive. Don't want to buy health insurance? Armed agents are on their way. Want to buy actual milk in a transaction between two consenting, informed adults? Good chance your door is getting kicked in by agents with guns drawn. Not joking, that has happened. Memes are poor excuses for discourse but now and again they serve a purpose:

Yep. Gun control is really people control. 

I know I am something of a seeming contradiction. a non-resistant Christian in the tradition of the Anabaptists who is also a frothing at the mouth supporter of the Second Amendment but if life has taught me anything it is that liberty is more valuable than "security" and that people in the government and writing for the editorial board of the NY Times are not interested in your safety, liberty or prosperity, they are mostly interested in controlling you to benefit themselves. That is an inconvenient truth but a truth nonetheless. 

Ah the media

Double standard much?

When a religious figure falsely predicts global calamity, the media trips over themselves covering it and giggling when it is proven false.

When the United Nations Environment Program predicts global calamity including 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010 and nothing of the sort happens, the media reaction?

Crickets.

Gee, why am I so jaded about the media?

He was the best of Presidents, he was the worst of Presidents

As we approach the inauguration and the end of the Bush presidency, the liberal mainstream media are stumbling over themselves trying to define President Bush as the “worst President in history”. Listening to NPR, you can just tell that the reporters are giddy with the prospect of Bush leaving and Obama coming in. The Left is flush with victory and the power brokers in the American left have a dream set-up. They have an overwhelmingly liberal congress, a disheartened and discredited American conservatism and an incoming President who, although politically shrewd, is clearly in way over his head. Make no mistake that while Obama will be in the White House, the real power brokers are the Congressional leaders.

Is President Bush “the worst President in American history”? Hardly. Has he been disappointing in many ways, even to conservatives? Yes. Did he make mistakes of action and inaction, and become virtually irrelevant and ineffectual late in his eight years as President? Absolutely! Is he the worst President ever? Not by a long shot. In fact, he isn’t going to be even the worst living ex-President. Mr. Carter wins that one hands down. Despite the image makeover of Jimmy Carter and the kindness of years away from the White House, you cannot forget what a horrible President he was. I was very young when he was President and I remember all too well what a trainwreck he was. That is reflective in a funny way in the pictures of all of the living Presidents and former Presidents in the Oval Office a week or so ago. Much was made of the painfully obvious distance between Clinton, Obama, Bush I and Bush II and the outcast Jimmy Carter. Not sure if it was intentional or not, but it spoke volumes of what a terrible President Jimmy Carter was.

When Ronald Reagan hammered Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, look where America was. We were in a deep economic malaise. We were a paper tiger in the world. The Soviets bullied us, our military was still stinging from the political defeat of Vietnam and in the greatest stain on American sovereignty a number of our citizens were being held hostage by terrorist thugs in Tehran. The sight of American citizens being paraded around as hostages with blindfolds on was one of the most shameful moments in American modern history, right up there with Americans fleeing Vietnam and dead soldiers being paraded around the streets of Mogadishu. After 444 days of the hostages being held in Tehran, in one of the most stinging rebukes ever given, the American hostages were released within minutes of Ronald Reagan taking office. The message was clear. Jimmy Carter was ineffective in getting the hostages released, was unwilling to do anything militarily about it and the botched rescue attempt frightened him into inaction.

The hostage crisis was the most visible of the Carter failures but the economy was in terrible shape as well. It was tough to borrow money at double digit interest rates. The economy was in the tank. There were gas lines in California. Right or wrong (I would say largely “right”!), the American people blamed Carter. Things were bad, he was negative about it and utterly lacking in basic leadership. I wouldn’t trust Jimmy Carter to lead me through the front door of my house, much less lead our nation.

Carter lost to Reagan by almost 10% of the popular vote. He only carried six states and the District of Columbia, losing 489 to 49 in the electoral college. Granted, compared to Walter Mondale’s debacle in 1984 where he carried one state and the District, losing by over 18% of the popular vote and losing 525-13 in the electoral college, it wasn’t that bad but when you look the alleged mandate of Barack Obama who beat McCain by 7% in the popular vote and 365-173 in the electoral college it is obvious that Carter was rejected and tossed out of office by the American people.

What is also forgotten is that while President Bush is at, we are constantly reminded, “historically low” approval ratings, the Democratically controlled Congress gets even lower marks, with an approval rating of around 9%. People are scared and unhappy, and they are reflecting that upon those who are governing them. President Bush gets the attention because he is the President which also explains his approval ratings of over 90% following September 11th. People are mad at government and Bush is the easy target. It is hard to be mad at Representative So-and-so from Podunk, Missouri unless you are in that district, but it is easy to aim your ire at President Bush and the media is more than happy to help encourage and channel that anger. When times are good, the President gets the accolades and cheers. When times are bad, he gets boos and low approval ratings.

So here is my retrospective on the Bush presidency.

The Bush presidency is really divided into two parts. The first part is made up of the weeks and months after September 11th. I would say that this first part ended with the now infamous speech on the warship returning home from the Persian Gulf with the “Mission Accomplished” banner. It was really at that point that opinion seemed to start turning against Bush, with the aid and abetting of the mainstream media beating the drum of defeat and failure, with their macabre running tally of U.S. military deaths reported as they happened.

First the errors of the Bush presidency.

Iraq

Iraq was perhaps the right war at the wrong time. Removing Saddam Hussein was a worthwhile mission. The world is a better place without him and his murderous sons raping and pillaging (literally) the Iraqi people. No sane person has any doubt that Hussein had at one time chemical weapons, proven by the bodies of Kurds in Northern Iraq and the use of those same weapons in the Iran-Iraq war. No sane person thinks that Hussein was not trying his hardest to obtain or develop nuclear weapons. The U.N. had weapons inspectors in Iraq for years to keep him from developing nukes, they weren’t in Baghdad on vacation. (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Saddam Hussein’s successor in the crazy Islamic dictator chair is doing the exact same thing and is a lot closer to success.) The war was prosecuted properly, with swift military victory. The war itself is not the problem. The problem came before and after the war. We waited way too long to go in, giving Hussein time to move any evidence of a weapons program out of the country. I assume he thought by hiding his program he could ride out the invasion and go back to developing nukes later. I don’t think he saw his death at the end of a rope being his ultimate destiny. Afterward it became apparent that we had not thought out the rebuilding process as well as we should have, and years of stumbling, roadside bombs and virtual outright civil war followed. Liberating Iraq is not like liberating France from the Nazis. They had no idea how to run a democracy and are just now figuring it out. The liberation of Iraq will be the defining event of the Bush presidency and you can bet it will be spun negatively until Iraq is standing as a free, democratic state on her own someday in the future.

Hurricane Katrina

At the start, let me say that philosophically I don’t think it is the Federal government’s job to run to every natural disaster and fix things. Also, like many of the ills of the Bush administration, this fiasco was partly the fault of the Democrats (i.e. the lovely mayor of New Orleans and others who made it hard to get anything done) and also a media circus. But Bush looked tentative and uncaring during Katrina, and his lack of decisiveness made it seem like something should have been done but wasn’t. Katrina left a black eye on the Bush presidency that he never fully dealt with.

The handling of the economic crisis

Again perception is everything. The perception is that Bush waited too long and the whole collapse was his fault. Much of the fault lies on his desk, but much of it also is systemic (see my post here: Death by Savings) Our economy is a shell game of credit and consumption, and all of that finally came to a head. September 11th is completely forgotten by many Americans who are more worried about their job. Ironically, because the Bush policies have worked so well in keeping us safe, Americans are back to being self-centered about their pocketbooks.

The abandonment of fiscal restraint

This is my biggest gripe. I would say that the GOP with the blessing of Bush has been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors. Too much was spent, too little was gained. Had we spent money on oil exploration or nuclear power plants, that at least would have been useful. Instead money was poured down a sinkhole. I have no idea where it all went.

President Bush has a high opinion of his fellow man, and that trust in people has been his downfall.

President Bush was played for a patsy by the Democrats on a number of occasions, and he let it happen because I think he inherently has a high opinion and trust for people. I think he needs to get away from the Methodist church he has been a member of and start going to a solid Calvinist church where he will learn about Total Depravity (Voddie Baucham’s church is in Texas I believe…)

But not all went wrong. Here are the things that went right.

Iraq

Iraq is the great contradiction of the Bush administration. On the one hand, for a long time it seemed like an abject failure. But today we see relative calm in Iraq. The government is still hardly stable and will need U.S. support politically, economically and militarily for some time to come. But overall the Iraqi people are far freer than they were under Hussein. There are some who think they were better off under a ruthless dictators, but those same sort of people point out that Hitler made the trains run on time. Someday Iraq will be a stand alone democracy, and people like the crazy guy who threw his shoes at Bush can thank him for liberating their country at the cost of his own political legacy.

Two great Supreme Court Justices in Alito and Roberts.

Those two jurists have proven to be a solidly conservative as advertised. It is too bad Bush didn’t get to replace one of the old line liberals so Roe v. Wade could be overturned. I expect now to see the old liberals retire so that Obama can replace them with someone younger and even more liberal. We were so very close….

Frequent tax cuts.

As President Bush pointed out last night, every American tax payer is paying less in Federal taxes than they were when he was in office. There needed to be deeper spending cuts to go along with the tax cuts (see above) but philosophically Bush was right on that lower taxes are both better for the economy in the long-term and the right thing to do.

Governance with conviction.

Like him or not, agree with his decisions or not, President Bush typically led based on his convictions. When public opinion turned, he rarely strayed from his path. Is that inflexible? Perhaps, but it is also principled and a stark contrast to his predecessor. Bill Clinton never met a Big Mac, intern or opinion poll that he didn’t like. To say that the eight years of Clinton were governance by opinion poll is not being unfair. Right or wrong, Clinton gave the people what they wanted and is remembered fondly for it. Bush often bucked his own party and is being punished for it.

Perhaps in the context of the Bush presidency, one success stands out more than this one: We have had no terrorist attacks on American soil in the more than seven years following September 11th. Those who say America is not safer today are head-in-the-sand liberals. Do you remember the weeks following September 11th? As a nation we were all expecting the next attack. But thanks in large part to the diligence of our armed forces, intelligence community and law enforcement we have not had a terrorist attack on America soil since September 11th. To have thought that would be the case, seven years with no terror attacks in America, on September 12th, 2001 would have been unthinkable. The Bush doctrine of taking the fight to the terrorists instead of trying to deal with the terrorists as common criminals has kept American civilians safe.

When President Bush was wrong, he was really wrong. When he was right, he was really right. Trying to reassure the American people that the economy was fundamentally sound when it was collapsing all around him made him look like “Baghdad Bob” during the liberation of Iraq. But when he stood on that rubble after September 11th and declared that those responsible would come to justice, when he gave his speech in the National Cathedral, there was no President like him. His presidency is one of great opportunity missed and great potential squandered. I, like many others, am disappointed but I think that an unbiased assessment of his Presidency in the future will be more kind than the media and liberal historians are today.

Media bias? What media bias!?

There are few things held in more disdain by the "mainstream" media quite like people serious about their faith and traditional sexual mores. So imagine the pleasure of the media when a report came out that teens who signed purity pledges to remain chaste until marriage were not any different in their sexual behavior than teens who didn’t sign them. “Hah, see it is all a sham!” crowed the media. From the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn Like A Virgin: The Press Take On Teenage Sex :

The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don't. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."

But not so fast…

Here's the rub: It just isn't true.

In fact, the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that "virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold."

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

- These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

- These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

- These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

- When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 -- compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

- And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste -- amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let's put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: "Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge."

So the reality is that virginity pledges aside, the bigger factor in teen sexual behavior is their religious upbringing. Far from being a discouragement, this should encourage parents that what they are teaching their children has an impact on the way they live later on. The numbers are still very disturbing and we still live in a sensuality driven culture that wars against what we try to instill in our kids, but the effort is worth the while. (jumping on soap box) I would still insist that trying to stem the tide of the secular worldview with a couple of heart to heart talks, an hour of Sunday school and another hour of youth group is not going to counteract the pervasive diet of sexual permissiveness that is rampant in public schools (jumping off soap box) .

This is yet another example of selective “reporting” designed to twist data to reach a predetermined outcome. This was not accidental. It is either sloppy journalism or more likely a willful attempt to twist data to push an agenda. That agenda is a simple one, and one that manifests itself in ways subtle and not-so subtle and seeks to tear down every wall of morality in our society and give cover to every sort of sin. We do a fine job of justifying our own sins as it is; I am a champion at it. I certainly don’t need the media helping me out in trying to rationalize away my own sinful behavior. Every Christian, heck any thinking person period, needs to examine what is coming out of media reports with a keen eye. All the more reason to base our worldview on the unchanging rock of Scripture. Media fads come and go but the Word of God is true and endures forever!

(Dr. Mohler featured this issue on his radio program Tuesday, I haven’t downloaded it to my iPod yet but I am sure it was excellent!)

A "small cache of weapons"?

Believe me, I am not a defender of Plaxico Burress. He is kind of a punk and played for Michigan State. But when the news media "reports" on something like this and

Weapons cache reportedly found at Plaxico Burress' home

Reports: Weapons, ammo seized at Burress' NJ home

Authorities seized a small cache of weapons and ammunition from the New Jersey home of New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress, the New York Post and Newsday both reported Wednesday, possibly setting up the embattled player for more legal trouble.

The Post, citing anonymous law enforcement sources, said a 9-mm handgun, a rifle and ammunition for three other guns — a .380, a .45 and a .40, the same caliber of gun Burress accidentally shot himself with — were seized during the execution of a search warrant at Burress' home in Totowa.

A "weapons cache"? One rifle. One handgun. Some ammunition. That is newsworthy? The headline makes it sound like he had dozens of M-16s hidden in a fortress, a virtual Branch Davidian compound in New Jersey. Nope, one rifle. One handgun. A couple of boxes of ammunition.

I would be willing to bet that most people in Michigan have at least that many firearms in their house, many of us have quite a few more. I know I do! I am afraid to think what the news media would describe my collection as: "an arsenal"? "A paramilitary training ground"? The national news media is so removed from the majority of Americans that the discovery of law-abiding citizens (not including Mr. Burress of course) owning firearms in the home and believing in God is like discovering a long-lost tribe in the jungle. Little wonder that Barack Obama derisively spoke of middle Americans clinging to their guns and religion, and that the comment caused little uproar on the coasts. How can we expect to get our news from people who spin reports like this, turning a couple of guns in an apocalyptic cult waiting for doomsday?

Media Bias? What media bias?!

I mentioned a couple of days ago, without being overly subtle, a hit-piece in Newsweek magazine chastising Christians for actually believing in that book they carry around when it comes to gay marriage. When it comes to caring for the poor, absolutely read the Bible! When it comes to sin, you need to look first to the prevailing winds of the culture!

The cover story is hardly unexpected, but behind the scenes is a more subtle sign of the extent to which the mainstream media attacks the Christian faith. Along with the piece by Lisa Miller is an editorial salvo from Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek:

On the campus of Wheaton College in Illinois last Wednesday, in another of the seemingly endless announcements of splintering and schism in the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan and other leaders of the conservative forces of reaction to the ecclesiastical and cultural acceptance of homosexuality declared that their opposition to the ordination and the marriage of gays was irrevocably rooted in the Bible—which they regard as the "final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life."

No matter what one thinks about gay rights—for, against or somewhere in between —this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism. Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt—it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.

Apparently being the editor of a "news" magazine with a rapidly declining readership qualifies Mr. Meacham to pass judgment on what is or is not orthodox, historical Christianity. Mr. Meacham uses much of the same mockery and misrepresentations that Ms. Miller used:

This is a sweeping and open declaration of Newsweek Magazines opposition to Biblical Christianity. Mark Hemingway of National Review makes the following succinct observation:

Of course, religious Americans are more than used to shoddy coverage of theological debates. So what else is new? Criticism that a Newsweek cover story serves a left-of-center political worldview is almost, well, a weekly occurrence.

What is remarkable about this week’s cover story was how Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham, has handled the backlash. He hasn’t defended the piece as a matter of opinion or part of a public debate. Rather, Newsweek has apparently come out of the closet as an explicitly ideological magazine editorially endorsing the article’s viewpoint.

Quite true. We are rapidly seeing the sheep's clothing being taken off by the increasingly bold wolves. We saw it in the unapologetic openness of the mainstream media's effusive support for Barack Obama, casting aside any pretense of neutrality. We saw, and are seeing it, in the media's ongoing overwhelming negative coverage of President Bush. We saw it in the media's initial coverage of the passage of Proposition 8. We see it now in this editorial note from Newsweek, perhaps the most bold declaration yet that the media is no longer even pretending to be neutral.

We should not be surprised by this blatant ideological bias on the part of Newsweek and other bastions of the old school mainstream media. In fact, as Christians we should welcome it. For too long these secular left institutions have been hiding behind journalistic integrity to claim to be unbiased. Now that they are increasingly "out of the closet" it should be easier to identify what they espouse as the ideological rhetoric it is, instead of assuming it to be actual news. I just hope that more people in the church will see these organizations for what they are: prophets and evangelists for the secular humanist left.

Who will decide which candidate will be our next President?

The treatment of Obama is unprecedented. Even the fawning over Bill Clinton doesn’t compare to this. Every thing he does, every step of his day is recorded and gloried in by the media. Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, etc. have all poked fun at the treatment of Obama by the media, and yet they still do it. The coverage of Obama is unfailingly positive, everything he does is spun in the best light. The “mainstream” media is clearly heavily invested in seeing Obama win, based on a combination between their desire to see the first black President, an open disdain bordering on hatred for President Bush and general warm fuzzies on their part towards Obama. Hopefully the American people will as a whole catch on to this uneven handling of the campaign and refuse to let the media power brokers in New York, Chicago and L.A. determine who will be President. The recent refusal by the New York Times to run a McCain op-ed piece while giving plenty of ink to Obama’s op-ed piece is a prime example, as is the wall to wall coverage of his “tour” of the Middle East.

Despite the one sided positive coverage of Obama, he still has only a slight lead over McCain. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning a poll that shows voters far more comfortable with McCain’s experience and background. That is before ads have really started to fly exposing the gross inexperience of Senator Obama. Average Americans get that he is not qualified or sufficiently experienced for the job, but he still holds a lead because of the non-stop media coverage, all of it favorable, of Senator Obama. From the Wall Street Journal...

WASHINGTON -- Midway through the election year, the presidential campaign looks less like a race between two candidates than a referendum on one of them -- Sen. Barack Obama.

With the nominations of both parties effectively settled for more than a month, the key question in the contest isn't over any single issue being debated between the Democrats' Sen. Obama or the Republicans' Sen. John McCain. The focus has turned to the Democratic candidate himself: Can Americans get comfortable with the background and experience level of Sen. Obama?

This dynamic is underscored in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The survey's most striking finding: Fully half of all voters say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. Obama would be as they decide how they will vote, while only a quarter say they are focused on what kind of president Sen. McCain would be.

The challenge that presents for Sen. Obama is illustrated by a second question. When voters were asked whether they could identify with the background and values of the two candidates, 58% said they could identify with Sen. McCain on that account, while 47% said the same of Sen. Obama. More than four in 10 said the Democratic contender doesn't have values and a background they can identify with.

Those findings suggest voters' views of Sen. Obama are more fluid than his relatively steady lead indicates. In the latest poll, 47% say they prefer Sen. Obama to win, while 41% say Sen. McCain, the same lead Sen. Obama enjoyed a month ago. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

The campaign's unusual dynamic appears to be the result of an anxious nation now sizing up an unconventional candidate who presents himself as the agent for change, which voters say they want. The contest thus parallels in some ways the 1980 race, when voters seemed ready for a change away from Jimmy Carter and the Democrats, but weren't persuaded until late in the race that they could be comfortable with a former actor and unabashed conservative, Ronald Reagan, as commander in chief.

"Obama is going to be the point person in this election," says pollster Peter Hart, a Democrat who conducts the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll along with Republican Neil Newhouse. "Voters want to answer a simple question: Is Barack Obama safe?"

If the answer is yes, then Sen. Obama stands to benefit further from a favorable environment for Democrats. If no, Sen. McCain is seen by a wide swath of Americans as a safe, well-qualified potential commander in chief. The poll was taken Friday through Monday, before much of the extensive press coverage of Sen. Obama's trip this week to the Middle East and Europe, meant to build his credibility.

So we have an election where on the one hand we have a young, hip, inexperienced made-for-TV candidate with supports who are incredibly passionate about him: “Sen. Obama is in the odd position of having unusually passionate backing from his supporters -- his voters are three times as likely to say they are excited about their choice as are Sen. McCain's…”, even though I would guarantee that the overwhelming majority of his supporters don’t know the first thing about his background or where he stands on issues beyond vague platitudes about “hope” and “change”. On the other hand we have an old, kind of curmudgeonly military vet with many more years of experience in Washington, a man with a firm grasp on issues even if you disagree with him.

The clear winning strategy for McCain seems pretty obvious, give a clear and simple set of issues, highlight what McCain would do and hammer it over and over…

• Energy independence. Use high energy prices and unease to promote an aggressive plan for new, safe drilling, exploration and nuclear power.
• Obama’s inexperience. This is dangerous because you don’t want to come across like Kerry, who seemed to view his military service even when in ‘Nam as a political tool. But you cannot ignore McCain’s experience as a military officer and a POW, as well as his decades of service and foreign policy expertise

This comment from a voter kind of sums it up:

“Patti Carr, 59 years old, of Collierville, Tenn., outside Memphis, says she voted for Democrats Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry. But she isn't yet sold on Barack Obama. His experience is giving her pause.

"I see Obama as a very nice person but I don't believe he has the experience at this time to be president," she says. "He's new, he's young and he still has a lot to learn, I believe." She leans for now toward Sen. McCain, but is open to persuasion.”

He is a nice guy (which he may or may not be, I wonder how much of that is a carefully constructed persona). His race to me is irrelevant other than as a landmark of how far race relations have come in spite of the efforts of race-baiters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to keep the hate alive. He is a great prepared speaker. But he is inexperienced, far left politically and willing to change positions seemingly at will. If McCain makes a shrewd choice for his VP, this could be another four years of the GOP controlling the White House and may even mitigate losses in Congress. But if he makes a poor choice trying to be a maverick he will propel an unqualified empty suit into the most powerful office in the world. Evangelicals want to get behind a candidate but are sitting on the sidelines right now. It is time for McCain to get them in the game.

It's an election, not a coronation, no matter how much the media wished it were otherwise.

All the (liberal) news that fit to print

Here is a shocker. The New York Times printed an op-ed piece from Barack Obama detailing his "plans" for Afghanistan and Iraq. When Senator McCain submitted his only op-ed piece, it was rejected. The reason? It needed to mirror more closely Senator Obama's piece...

The New York Times on Friday blocked an opinion piece submitted by John McCain to the newspaper shortly after it printed a piece by his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, McCain campaign officials confirmed to FOX News on Monday.

Obama’s piece detailed his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan. While McCain’s proposed piece also discussed Iraq, The Times told McCain’s advisers that it would not accept the op-ed in its current form because it did not offer new information. Obama’s speech previewed a series of speeches leading up to a highly publicized trip to war zones in the Middle East.

“I’d be very eager to publish the senator on the op-ed page. However, I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written. I’d be pleased, though, to look at another draft. Let me suggest an approach,” Times op-ed editor David Shipley wrote the campaign via an e-mail later distributed by McCain’s team.

“It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory — with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate. And it would need to describe the Senator’s Afghanistan strategy, spelling out how it meshes with his Iraq plan,” Shipley wrote.

Shipley, who was named deputy editor in January 2003, served in the Clinton administration as a senior presidential speechwriter and special assistant to the president from 1995 to 1997.

Huh, so John McCain's opinion on Iraq and Afghanistan (the opinion of a military veteran and war hero) is only valid if it "mirrors" his opponents op-ed piece. So says a former Clinton speechwriter. I am sure Mr. Shipley is an entirely unbiased source, a true journalist and not a leftist hack and apologist for Democrats who would do anything to see Obama win. What is really sad is that so many people won't see anything wrong with this, because they are drinking the "Hope and Change" Kool-Aid.

See, there isn't a liberal bias in the news media after all!

The disconnect between the headline and the real news

I read this headline on the Detroit Free Press webpage:

Group: Hate crimes against gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered people up 133%

Sounds horrifying, right? But when you dig into the story and get beyond the headlines, here is what you find.

The Triangle Foundation said Tuesday that the number of violent crimes against Michiganders because of their sexual orientation that was reported to the Detroit-based group jumped 133% last year over 2006.

There were 226 reported incidents during 2007 involving violence or violent threats against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people, according to the report, which was released in conjunction with the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. By comparison, the foundation said, there were 97 reported incidents in 2006.

Among the 226 reports last year were two homicides, 21 cases of vandalism, 46 assaults and 101 incidents of intimidation or harassment, the report said. In addition to the violent incidents, the foundation reported 72 cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

So how many homicides did we have in Michigan last year total versus the 2 that were labelled as "hate crimes" How many cars and homes were vandalized? How many people were "intimidated" in one way or another? This is a prime example of a news story that seeks to push an agenda. We have something as amorphous as "intimidation" labeled a "hate crime" and with probably inflated numbers from the Triangle Foundation. The entire story is based on suspect numbers and vague definitions. But to read the headline, you would come to the conclusion that Michigan is in the midst of a crime wave against homosexuals.

Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people turn to mainstream newspapers and news programs to get their news? I long ago stopped giving an credence to what is peddled as news by the mainstream, left-leaning media. Maybe that makes me a right wing kook. I guess I am OK with that, unless of course that qualifies as "intimidation".