Vote McCain II

Here’s part two in what may become a series of “Rah Rah!” pro-McCain posts. What can I say? There are a lot of people out there who need some persuading.

The American Thinker thinks conservatives may be in the process of cutting off their noses to spite their faces:

Perhaps because I’m a neocon, and not a dyed-in-the-wool, native-born conservative, I look at John McCain, with all his flaws, and still think that he’s a pretty darn good candidate for our time. More importantly, I think that Obama is a very dangerous candidate precisely because of the time in which we live. I therefore find disturbing the number of conservative purists who insist that they’re going to teach John McCain — and everyone else, dammit! — a lesson, either by sitting out the election or by throwing their vote away on a third party candidate. This is a kind of political game that may be fun to play in uninteresting eras, but I think it’s suicidal given the pivotal existential issues we now face.

Read the whole thing. There are differences in the candidates; big ones that can have monumental repercussions if the wrong person is elected.

Come drink the sweet koolaid with me.

Hat tip: Astute Bloggers

UPDATE:

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has some nice stuff to say about McCain too:

For those who have yet to read McCain’s memoirs, the description of his treatment gets fairly graphic. The narrative will cause readers to wonder how any of the men survived, and McCain reminds us that some didn’t. Some news accounts now have McCain only getting tortured in the beginning of his captivity, but that isn’t true; it ebbed and flowed depending on the political and military situation. It didn’t improve appreciably until the Nixon administration started allowing released POWs to tell the truth about their treatment, something the Johnson administration had resisted. The embarrassment forced Hanoi to clean up its act, at least for a while.

McCain also credits Nixon for his release in an interesting way. He understood, even when in the POW camp, that negotiations alone would not end the war. The Communists had to fear defeat before they would negotiate in good faith, and Johnson had never given them that fear. Nixon’s political risk in bombing Hanoi did the trick, and McCain admired Nixon for taking that risk in order to do what was right in the war — even if Nixon failed to do what was right with Watergate.

That sounds similar to George Bush sticking with Iraq in 2004, and McCain sticking with Iraq in 2008. If one wonders whether he is sincere in saying that he would rather lose an election than lose a war, they can read this passage and see McCain’s commitment to it. He credits that impulse with getting him home in 1973.

Obama Said He Attended TUCC Services “Every Week” In 2004 Interview

Which is interesting, because I seem to remember him saying that his church attendance was spotty, and he, ya know…missed a lot of stuff. Here he is in a Fox interview with Major Garrett after the Reverend Wright became a household name:

GARRETT: As a member in good standing, were you a regular attendee of Sunday services?

OBAMA: You know, I won’t say that I was a perfect attendee. I was regular in spurts, because there was times when, for example, our child had just been born, our first child. And so we didn’t go as regularly then. But…

Here he is in a 2004 interview with Cathleen Falsani who wrote the book, The God Factor: Inside The Spiritual Lives Of Public People.

GG:
Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.

Ever been there? Good service.

I actually wrote a book called Dreams from My Father, it’s kind of a meditation on race. There’s a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.

The whole interview is posted at Falsani’s blog.

He seemed a bit more willing to expound on his regular church attendance with no qualifiers at that time, eh?

Later on in the interview:

GG:
Do you have people in your life that you look to for guidance?

OBAMA:
Well, my pastor is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for.
I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely.

GG:
Those two will keep you on your toes.

OBAMA:
And theyr’e good friends. Because both of them are in the public eye, there are ways we can all reflect on what’s happening to each of us in ways that are useful.

I think they can help me, they can appreciate certain specific challenges that I go through as a public figure.

Well, Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger are two “good friends” who have been effectively thrown under the bus. Will Meeks be next?

Recommended Reading: The Loser Letters

NRO has been running a series of articles by Mary Eberstadt, written in the same style as The Screwtape letters, entitled, The Loser Letters. Written from the point of view of an atheist convert to other (militant) atheist authors, the letters are meant to offer helpful tips from a former Christian’s point of view.

First and second installments here and here.

Highly entertaining and recommended reading.

The third installment is called The trouble With Good Works, because in terms of good works, atheists don’t have a lot to hang their hats on :

One of the worst things that’s happened lately for all those claims of Yours that believers and nonbelievers are morally equivalent in their behavior toward others in the Species is another horrible new book. This one’s by econo-brain Arthur C. Brooks and is called Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. Geeking over what he calls “the fruit of years of analysis on the best national and international datasets available on charity, lots of computational horsepower, and the past work of dozens of scholars who have looked at various bits and pieces of the charity puzzle,” numbers nerd Brooks shows beyond a doubt one fact that our Side should not want out — i.e., that American believers are more “generous” in every sense than the enlightened likes of Us.

Brooks says that religious people give more to charity than non-religious people — in fact, much more: “an enormous charity gap,” he reports, “remains between religious and secular people.”

To see this, imagine two women who are both forty-five years old, white, married, have an annual household income of $50,000, and attended about a year of college. The only difference between them is that one goes to church every week, but the other never does. The churchgoing woman will be 21 percentage points more likely to make a charitable gift of money during the year than the non-churchgoer, and she will also be 26 points more likely to volunteer. Furthermore, she will tend to give $1,383 more per year to charity, and to volunteer on 6.4 more occasions. Brooks goes on to test the charity gap up, down, and sideways. The results are always the same: “People who pray every day (whether or not they go to church) are 30 percentage points more likely to give money to charity than people who never pray (83 to 53 percent). And people saying they devote a ‘great deal of effort’ to their spiritual lives are 42 points more likely to give than those devoting ‘no effort’ (88 to 46 percent). Even a belief in beliefs themselves is associated with charity. People who say that ‘beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good person’ are dramatically less likely to give charitably (69 to 86 percent) and to volunteer (32 to 51 percent) than people who think that beliefs do matter.”

In fact, it’s not even all dollars and cents. Brooks also reports that religious people volunteer more than seculars — and even give more Species blood!

In the end, her advice to (militant) atheists:

Just keep focused at all times on the evils committed in religion’s name. Never mind how long ago they were! Try not to let the Dulls point out that you are comparing religious apples (i.e. what institutionalized religion did in Europe 600 years ago) with atheist oranges (i.e. what institutionalized atheism did in Europe 60 years ago). Mercifully, as it were, many of them are just ignorant enough of history not to call our bluffs on rhetorical saves like that.

But never, never, never, pretend that we have a code that would in any way render us as attentive to Nature’s Castoffs as the Dulls are, because we don’t — and not only don’t we have one, but in principle we don’t want one.

RELATED story in the news, today:

Are Conservatives More Honest Than Liberals?

Yes, according to a whole slew of studies, and surveys. Why? Peter Schweizer ponders that question:

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn’t have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

During this political season, honesty is often in short supply. But at least we can improve things by accepting the idea that truth and honesty exist. As the late scholar Sidney Hook put it, “the easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.”

“Not Pretty”: How Barack Obama Won His Illinois Senate Seat

I think we can expect more of Obama’s “New old kind of (dirty) Politics” in the months to come.