Question for the Antiwar, Obama Supporters

Victor Davis Hanson asks…

 

… how did Obama, the archetype war critic, find himself bombing—in optional and preemptive fashion, and without congressional authority — an Arab Muslim oil-exporting country, and one that posed no immediate threat to American national security, despite being governed by a monster who, nevertheless, had been recently courted by Western intellectuals, academics, universities, and diplomats?”

 

Not to mention Hollywood swells.

 

Well? What’s the answer?

History for Journalistic Dummies

From the always excellent Michael Ramirez

Obama's [lack of] Involvement

 

Are we in a Nero fiddles while Rome burns moment?

 

The Decemberists

REM Reincarnate



Love this band

Is Lying Always Wrong?

A month or so ago, pro-life activist Lila Rose and her organization Live Action profoundly damaged the credibility and reputation of Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion provider. To do this they posed as as pimps requesting the assistance of Planned Parenthood to aid and abet those whom they were led to believe were involved in the sex trafficking of underage girls. More recently, NPR and PBS have been exposed as false fronts by James O’Keefe using a similar ploy.

 

This technique, pretending to be someone s/he is not, has exercised the moral imaginations of the Christian communities, and most especially of the Catholic Christians whose Catechism decrees (contra the Biblical witness) that there can be no exceptions to truth-telling, vis, that we are always and everywhere required to tell the truth.

 

Prof. Robert P. George expresses the Catholic position very well in a post last month in the Mirror of Justice blog. Below is my response to Prof. George copied verbatim from his post Life and Truth:

I couldn't disagree with Prof. George more emphatically. Evidently, Prof. George, like Cardinal Newman, agrees that...

"The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions who are upon it to die of starvation in extremist agony...than that one soul...should tell one willful untruth, though it harmed no one."

Immanuel Kant believed that telling the truth was a universal moral absolute that allowed for no exceptions. Kant argued that if a would-be murderer inquires whether "our friend who is pursued by him has taken refuge in our home," we are forbidden to lie and mislead him. Here Kant is speaking directly to the "Jews in the attic" scenario during the reign of the Nazis in Germany.

However noble, this understanding of the priority of truth as expressed by Newman, Kant, and Prof. George, it is simply not warranted Biblically.As a matter of fact, the Biblical witness reveals that a decision to be truthful is a contingent one. If not, how do we explain the following:

·         (Exodus 1:15-21)God rewards two midwives for lying in order to save the lives of newborn Hebrew males.

·         (1 Samuel 12:12-13, 20:1, 26:6-7) Abraham tells Pharaoh and Abimelech respectively that Sara is his sister in order to save his own life.

·          (1 Samuel 16:2-3) God instructs Samuel to lie.

In these three cases (there are more) lying is the means to the saving of life. Moreover, the liar is either rewarded, encouraged, or simply not punished. This absolutist view advanced by Prof. George just doesn't square with God's revealed will and, in the worst case, leads to the tolerance and propagation of evil.

For a fuller treatment of this subject you can read The Ethics of Truth – Part I and Part II