President Obama is not shy about using religious language and religious imagery. He has said that he hopes to be “an instrument of God.” (Shouldn’t we all.) And, the other day, I saw a photo of him next to a neon cross (pretty garish). I also read what he said about critics of his health-care plans: They were “bearing false witness.” And I thought, “Oh, if George W. Bush had used such language, and if he had been photographed next to crosses . . .”
I also thought of Bill Clinton. He talked about Jesus a lot — a lot — and, during the Lewinsky scandal, he went to the Foundry United Methodist Church (in D.C.), waving a big fat Bible at the cameras.
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Oh, if George W. Bush had done that — they’d have called him a dangerous theocrat. Oh, wait, they did anyway . . . Remember when certain commentators delighted in calling Bush vs. al-Qaeda a clash of “fundamentalisms”? Remember what they said about the attorney general, John Ashcroft?
Kind of a funny country we’re living in. A beauty-pageant contestant says that she is opposed to gay marriage, believing that marriage is between a man and a woman — and she is pilloried as some kind of modern-day witch. But when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Bill Clinton — pretty much all major Democrats — express the same opinion: Everyone’s cool.
I know the standard answer: The Left (broadly speaking) realizes those Democrats don’t mean it; and they’re pretty sure that Miss California does. So, can we say the same thing about religion? But to question the sincerity of anyone else’s convictions, professions, or displays is to engage in a kind of McCarthyism. Can’t have that. (And it’s true: You can’t. Although some honest curiosity, or wondering, is legit.)
Remember when Jesse Jackson likened Vice President Quayle to Herod, before a roaring Democratic convention? America can stoop pretty low, as we all know.
Hugo Chávez is doing his best to turn Venezuela into a Castroite prison. He has a way to go yet; but he is making great progress. This might seem a side issue — given all that Chávez is doing to Venezuela — but he has now turned his ire and power on golf. He has closed some of the country’s courses and denounced the sport in general. He called it “bourgeois,” of course — that butt-dumb slur of the Marxists. And he said, “I respect all sports. But there are sports and there are sports. Do you mean to tell me this is a people’s sport? It is not.”
The temptation is to list all the poor people who have risen in golf. Because I am a student of the game, I could give a pretty long list: backwoodsmen like Sam Snead; barrio kids like Chi Chi Rodriguez; blah, blah, blah. And we could talk about all the poor or modestly-off people who have been made quite happy by golf. I have known hundreds (having worked at public golf courses). But we should resist these temptations: because we’re talking about a freedom issue, above all. And, every day, freedom is being diminished — choked — in Venezuela, by these thugs.
It’s so easy to make light of this issue: a dictator and golf. Ha ha ha! At Foggy Bottom, our spokesman P. J. Crowley joked, “As the Department of State’s self-appointed ambassador-at-large for golf, I wish to protest the unwarranted attack by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez on the game of golf.” Chávez was “out of bounds,” you see.
Ha ha ha! But there is really nothing funny about the daily cementing of authoritarian — totalitarian? — rule.
A man who changes the date of Valentine’s Day, I have written in the past — Chávez did this — can do just about anything. So can a man who anathematizes and outlaws golf. Count on it, chillen.
I looked at the State Department
bio of the aforementioned spokesman, Crowley. And I read this: “Prior
to joining the Center for American Progress, he served as vice president of the Insurance Information Institute, focusing on strategic industry issues that included the impact of terrorism on commercial insurance in the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy.”
Did Crowley write his own bio? I assume so. In any event, someone did. And anyone capable of calling 9/11 a “tragedy” is not fit to serve in the State Department. If 9/11 was a tragedy — what was the Titanic’s encounter with an iceberg? Was the Khmer Rouge’s work a “tragedy” too? If you can’t call 9/11 what it was — a series of atrocities, an hour of mass-murder, a gross attack of war — you are not equipped to cope with the modern world.
I wonder how yellow-ribbon America — our Oprahfied America — would have coped with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I fear they would have made mincemeat of us. I may be wrong.
