:Reasonable Force

The latest installment of Chrenkoff’s ‘Good News’ features. Kudos to James Taranto and the WSJ for running these helpful articles.

This is worth the time to read and follow the links. His intro is below:

Reading the news from Iraq often reminds one of the old adage about the glass–in Iraq it seems to be half-empty at best; at worst, broken, with water fast draining into the sand. The past two weeks have not been an exception. Whether covering the on-again, off-again al Sadr uprising in Najaf (the glass half-full, excessively stirred), the latest kidnappings (the glass missing altogether), interruptions in oil production (glass half-empty, but priced as if full), or the meeting of the Iraqi National Conference (too many half-empty glasses, all clinking together), there was no escaping the continuing negativity of the mainstream media coverage.

Experts might debate exactly how much water there is in the Iraqi glass, but there is little doubt that–yet again–while the cameras and microphones were pointing toward the carnage, violence and corruption, Iraq has continued its slow and steady march out of its three-decade-long nightmare into a much more normal tomorrow. Below are some of the positive developments and good-news stories of the past fortnight that for most part received very little media attention. It’s a pity because the story of “Iraq, the phoenix rising from the ashes” is in many ways a lot more interesting, not to say consequential, than the usual steady media diet of “Iraq, the Wild East.”

Thank heavens for the internet.

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Writing on Townhall.com, National Review editor Rich Lowry takes on the McCain myth that has been one of John Kerry’s weapons to attempt to link Bush and the SwiftVets.

Lowry rightly notes that Bush never impugned McCain’s military service, just as he has never impugned Kerry’s. The entire charge is based on statements by a Bush supporter, also a veteran, charging that McCain’s Senate voting record had not been friendly to veterans.

“He has always opposed all the legislation,” the pro-Bush vet said, “be it Agent Orange or Gulf War health care, or frankly the POW/MIA issue.” You don’t have to subscribe to every particular of this litany to consider it firmly in-bounds. A McCain vote in 1999 against a Department of Veterans Affairs spending bill, for instance, angered some vets, as did his work to normalize relations with Vietnam. Veterans of Foreign Wars gave McCain a 75 percent favorable rating in 1998, respectable but lower than other senators who scored in the 80 percent to 100 percent range. In 1995, McCain scored a mere 27 percent. So it’s not as though his legislative record was beyond reproach.

Journalist Byron York has debunked the other “McCain was smeared in South Carolina” charge. McCain mainly alleged that the Bush campaign was calling voters in a dirty “push poll” and telling them, “McCain is a cheat and a liar and a fraud.” McCain’s charge was based on the testimony of one 14-year-old boy. The Bush campaign released the script of the advocacy calls it was making, and the script said only, “Don’t be misled by McCain’s negative tactics.” Asked by the Los Angeles Times to provide voters who had received the smear calls, the McCain campaign unearthed only six. According to the Times, of the voters it could reach, “three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all.”

McCain lost in South Carolina because he was too liberal for Republican primary voters and his campaign was considered too negative after he compared Bush’s honesty to Bill Clinton’s. A Washington Post columnist recently complained in outraged tones that the Bush campaign in South Carolina was “questioning the conservative credentials” of McCain. Horrors! That is at least an accurate depiction of what happened, but hardly an outrage.

Lowry says earlier in the article that McCain, along with Max Cleland, has an “inability to distinguish between criticisms of their records and themselves personally.” I think this is being a bit generous. Rather, I would say, that both gentlemen find it advantageous to try to color any criticism as an attack on their patriotism and service to their country. They use their military service and the sympathy for wounds they suffered therein, McCain as a POW, Cleland as triple-amputee, to attempt to shame political opponents out of debating their positions.

Senator McCain does his party a disservice by perpetuating the myth of an attack on his service by the Bush campaign, and by doing so in defense of John Kerry, a man who actually did denigrate the service of McCain and every other Vietnam veteran, and provided the North Vietnamese with plenty of propaganda to use against POWs. Why does McCain not lash out against those who question the patriotism and integrity of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Why does he take the position that Kerry’s service record is unimpeachable, but those of the Swifties are open to scrutiny as they are clearly attack dogs of the Bush campaign?

As a South Carolinian I can say that it was positions such as this one that cost McCain my vote, not any skulduggery by President Bush. I prefer a man who knows, and whose constituents know, which side he’s on.

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IHT: With an eye on U.S. vote, North Korea rails at Bush

“The North Koreans made it very clear, politely, that they want Mr. Kerry to win the election,” said Kenneth Quinones, a former U.S. diplomat who was in Pyongyang this month for a Korean studies conference.

Yeah, the Russkies didn’t like Reagan much either.

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As you can tell by the big, blue button in my sidebar I have joined my blog to a group that unites and promotes pro-Bush bloggers. Originator Matt Margolis and friends are trying to harness the power of the blogosphere to counter the institutionalized spin-mill that is the liberal press.

Each week, Blogs for Bush highlights some of the notable bloggers on their rolls. This week’s list can be found here.

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Important perspective check from Australian blogger, Arthur Chrenkoff writing in OpinionJournal.

The challenges still ahead in Iraq are considerable, but the media, in their manic rush from one disaster to the next and from one “quagmire” to another, rarely provide the context that would help us understand the situation. Having followed the mainstream media coverage, one can be forgiven for thinking that our task in Iraq is merely to return the country to its prewar status quo. More often than not lost in reporting is the realization that Iraq has to recover from the violence and destruction not just of the past year and a half, but of the past 30 years.

Iraq of March 2003 was not a normal, well-functioning state thrown into chaos and mayhem only by the arrival of the Coalition forces. In reality, the preinvasion Iraq was a wreck of a country whose great potential of the 1950s and 1960s has been all but completely squandered for the sake of the aggrandizement of one man and the hegemony of his party. It’s important to bear that in mind before rushing to criticize the coalition authorities for failing to rebuild in a year what took three decades to destroy.

Well worth the time to read the entire article.

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Admittedly this isn’t a well-researched position, but I have long generally held that, in Christian terms, the world situation was going to get darker and more bleak, with man becoming more and more depraved and Christianity ultimately being despised and outlawed, until Christ returns and sets all things right. Some of the fuel for this belief has no doubt been my exposure to premillennial dispensationalism. While I am not wholly sold on pretribulational rapture I do subscribe to a fairly literal reading of the book of Daniel and the Revelation of John, suggesting an antichrist figure waging war against the Church and ruling until destroyed by Christ who will then establish, for a time, an earthly kingdom.

Also in support of this position would seem to be the decline of Christian influence in Western culture. Europe has all but abandoned its spiritual heritage and many in the U.S. are doing all they can to emulate them here. Legalized abortion has cost millions of lives and, if the activists have their way, the legitimization of homosexuality seems right around the corner.

Nevertheless, I am not entirely satisfied with this view of “last things” and have ahead of me some serious research to come to a more thoughtful and informed position. Until that task is completed, however, my default position is pretty much as stated above. I mention this because a recent article by Pastor T.M. Moore at BreakPoint has given me pause to consider how that view might be affecting my drive to engage the culture with a Christian worldview.

Here are Pastor Moore’s opening paragraphs:

In the contemporary conflict of worldviews it matters how we view the overall drift of the tide of battle. If, for example, we believe that the Gospel, the Biblical worldview, and the Church, which is the agent of these, are destined to be overwhelmed, or, at least, stalemated by the forces of naturalism, secularism, and false religion, this will affect our attitude toward such long-term projects as cultural renewal and moral reformation. We are not likely to invest the time, energy, and resources necessary for substantial and enduring change if we have become persuaded that all our efforts will only come to naught in the teeth of the savage beasts of unbelief.

As things stand, a large majority of evangelicals have been trapped in just such an eschatology for over a generation now. Convinced that the last days are upon us, and reading the prophecies of Scripture to indicate the worldwide advance of the forces of darkness, many of the followers of Christ today have abandoned the moral, social, and cultural dimensions of the Great Commission. They have settled into a mindset of spiritual retreatism, cultural isolationism, and personal peace and wellbeing. The results of this “hunkered down” eschatology have been disastrous. Our can’t-win/can’t-do mentality has led us to vacate the field of battle, gazing up into the heavens in hope that soon the rapture will deliver us from this God-forsaken world. Meanwhile, the forces of darkness have capitalized on this self-fulfilling, self-defeating outlook by overrunning the ground we have so irresponsibly abandoned. The gathering storm clouds of wickedness and evil, for the moment obscuring the Sun of Righteousness, have cast their gloom over the world, where the followers of Christ have withdrawn to await the return of the Lord. The result is a society and a culture awash in relativism and mere sensuality, and a Church which, is pushed to the margins and regarded with contempt.

Pastor Moore goes on to argue that Scripture teaches a different eschatology altogether, and that indications are actually far more hopeful for the spread of the light of Christ’s love in this present age. Whether or not his view is correct, the charge that our view of the End Times has prompted us to yield the field of battle to the secularists is a stinging one that I suspect has a good bit of truth to it.

I recommend the entire article, and I welcome some comments on this subject. His questions at the end are a good place to start.

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San Francisco’s mayor has been slapped down by the California Supreme Court in a 5-2 decision to void the same-sex marriages he illegally licensed earlier this year. Constitutional challenges to the laws restricting marriage to its traditional understanding are already in the works, but this decision was an important check against officials who seek to impose their ideology in contravention of the law.

(hat tip: Drudge)

Clarification: The 5-2 vote was, as I said, to nullify the nearly 4000 marriages. This was preceded, however, by a unanimous ruling that the mayor had exceeded his authority in issuing the licenses in the first place.

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In a Reuters report about tests of a new, longer range Iranian missile I was struck by this quote:

“If Israel behaves like a lunatic and attacks the Iranian nation’s interests, we will come down on their heads like a mallet and break their bones,” the ISNA students news agency quoted Revolutionary Guards Commander Yahya Rahim Safavi as saying on Wednesday.

Not to downplay the seriousness of Iran’s military developments, but why am I unimpressed by this boast? Perhaps because of history (also see here). Or perhaps because of some of the quotable gems from this guy!

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I’ve been hearing a lot about various levels of satisfaction with M. Night Shyamalan’s latest offering, The Village, and I have to say that I think a lot of people are missing the point.

First let me say that there’s obviously a lot of subjectivity involved with why we watch movies, what we’re looking for and what determines whether we think one is good or bad. If you saw it and you’re disappointed then you simply are. I enjoyed it immensely, however, and I hope that reading this will give you pause to reevaluate and maybe even give the movie another viewing with a different perspective.

This particular filmmaker has received a good bit of attention for the surprises that he has put in his movies to date. I was one of the unfortunates who was clued in to the big twist of The Sixth Sense before I actually saw it. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly and may not have ever watched it had I not known. I thought the idea was very clever and have watched Shyamalan’s movies with interest ever since, enjoying each while recognizing that they are all different kinds of movies. I don’t go expecting a big thrill or a mind-blowing twist. I simply enjoy the way Shyamalan incorporates humanity into his stories and how he seems to respect our spiritual nature; our need for more than naturalism can provide.

It’s his cleverness that I think people are really appreciating when they say they like the “twists” in his plots. After all, you can’t really call the ending of Signs a twist, can you? The perceptive moviegoer comes to find out that a movie ostensibly about aliens isn’t really about that at all, but that’s understood gradually as the story unfolds. In the same sense, The Village isn’t really about the monsters in the woods.

One complaint I’ve heard is that the movie was marketed as a horror picture and moviegoers haven’t found that description accurate. Personally, the commercials I saw didn’t do the viewer an injustice. The villagers did indeed live with the rules described in the trailers and fear of these creatures was a reality. That is the backdrop of their daily lives as the movie opens. It’s difficult for me to conceive of another way the film could have been marketed effectively. Certainly there is romance, but that element is played out amidst the ever-present sense of danger and imminent tragedy. If you expected a slasher picture than you haven’t really been paying attention to the kinds of movies Shyamalan has been making.

Finally, some may not feel the story is believable. All I can ultimately say to that is that we (most of us, anyway) gladly suspend disbelief to buy into the vision of far worse movies than this.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t listen to the critics. Treat yourself to yet another thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable movie by one of today’s most talented and insightful filmmakers.

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Once again, a judge legislates from the bench in contravention of the laws passed by the people’s representatives.

SEATTLE – A King County Superior Court judge in Seattle has ruled that gay couples can marry…

Washington is among 38 states with laws defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

This is why all of the talk about this being a “state’s rights” issue is so much hooey. Hopefully, Washington’s state Supreme Court will overrule this decision.

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