Random Thoughts on the Civil Forum

- That Barak Obama's Christian testimony at the Saddleback Civil Forum was superior to John McCain's mainly highlights the limited utility of the question. The(admittedly bizarre) combination of Calvin, Darwin, and William James in my own worldview causes me to say: politically speaking, I don't care whether my president is going to heaven. I do care who's side he's on. But short of an expression of dogmatic atheism (or Islam), the candidates' answers to Warren's question were likely to be a poor proxy for what matters.

- [This one I added since the original post.] I have become much more skeptical than I once was of the assertion that a man's Christian faith necessarily requires him to be politically pro-life. For that matter, I am skeptical that in a previous era it required him to be an abolitionist. On the opposite end, I would say that an actual abortionist, or a Portuguese slave-trader, is afflicted with a moral blindness that voids any claim to actual faith. Somewhere between these poles lies the line. That said: I find Obama's assertion that Matthew 25 casts judgment on the government of the present-day United States for not spending enough money and energy on poverty and "racism", while he simultaneously argues that women ought to possess full autonomy to kill their babies, to be deeply contradictory, and suggests that Obama is in thrall to a vision of society completely at odds from anything that could be inspired by the faith he claims.

- That John McCain put himself foursquare behind choice and competition in public primary and secondary education is all very well, but a discerning follow-up question would have been to ask him what specific policies at the federal level would he undertake to advance these principles. Ideally, the best answer would be: "nothing", and I suspect that this is exactly McCain's intention. But while local communities should be responsible for their own education policies, in practice, the federal government is already knee-deep in education at both a regulatory and financial level. It would therefore not be inconsistent, at a minimum, to tie federal funding to the implementation of meaningful choice programs, if for no other reason than to counterbalance the extraordinary power of the teacher's unions seeking to prevent it.

- Better yet, a completely honest answer would have been to admit that no policy cocktail, even "choice and competition", will dramatically improve aggregate educational performance as we usually measure it. A school's demographic profile imposes a hard ceiling on what it can accomplish educationally, on average. What choice will do (and the reason I support it) is restore to school staff, and by extension the parents who choose them, a measure of control over both the worldview and the behavioral standards that the schools seeks to teach. Presently, these are determined by the ACLU.

- Lest I seem like an idiot, I knew perfectly well who Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) is; I just assumed that McCain must have been referring to someone other than a standard-issue Congressional Black Caucus hack. Correct me if I am wrong, but if John Lewis has ever cast a conservative vote in deviation from the CBC's party line, I am unaware of it. But that said, it may well be that most of the people who know this about Lewis are his constituents, who will therefore disproportionally view McCain's endorsement favorably. It's mendacious as hell, but McCain might have put some votes in play in Georgia's 5th CD.

- How ironic that the president can launch a war on the other side of the planet, and continue that war in the face of the public's opposition to it, but the government can't muster the will to control immigration with the public's support. It's all well and good that McCain pledges support for fighting Islamic extremism, but until the extremists own a fleet of B-2 bombers, our greatest danger will be America's immigrant Muslim community. Not only is this this the sea in which the terrorists swim, but the sea itself can drown us. Either way, it's time to drain the sea.