Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

 ". . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)   

     We are less than two months into the Obama Administration, and already this beast is beginning to show its true colors. I’m afraid I have to say that it is turning out exactly as I (and many others) predicted: We have a full-blown left-of-center Democrat crowd that is now in charge in Washington, and having taken deep draughts of the heady wine of power, they are busy executing their ideologically driven agenda.

Some of my readers may feel that I am spending way too much ink writing about Obama and his Administration. But the fact is that we are witnessing the greatest change in our government since FDR – a change that, in my view, is utterly catastrophic for America. We are rushing pell-mell down the road toward European-style democratic socialism, when the rest of the world is turning away from it toward our American type of capitalism. Insanity would not be too strong a word to describe what we are doing. I have to talk about it, and hopefully, bring God’s Word to bear on it. A little later in this commentary, therefore, I am going to share some Scriptures from Proverbs and Isaiah that speak to the situation we’re in.

All of Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric about doing away with the Capitol Hill culture of loading up appropriation bills with earmarks has proven to be baloney. He claimed that once he was President he would wield his veto pen on any and all irresponsible legislation that spent money recklessly and unnecessarily. Veteran observers of the political scene said “Yeah, right!” but hoped that he would follow through when he sat down in the Oval Office. In retrospect, it seems obvious now that he said those things simply to get elected, attempting to convince American voters that he wasn’t your usual spend-money-like-a-drunken-sailor Democrat politician.

Well, he’s not the usual Democrat politician – he’s worse! He has no intention of doing away with the earmarks. He has said not a word about the completely out-of-control stimulus bill that he signed into law recently, containing billions of dollars worth of pork funding for pet projects of Congressmen and Senators. Examples include: $1 billion for Head Start (a failed program from the beginning), $140 million for volcano monitoring sites, $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (they’re the lovely people who gave you the Cross of Christ in the urine and the Vagina Monologues “art” projects), $32 million for home-delivered nutrition services, $165 million for fish hatcheries, $1 billion for ACORN-eligible block grants (ACORN is the community organizing outfit that is under Federal investigation in at least 13 states for voter fraud. Obama used to teach there.) – I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Congressional Democrats are in pig heaven.

By the way, the stimulus bill is not primarily driven by the need to deal with the American economic crisis. If it were, it would not contain all the non-stimulus items that will do nothing to crank back up the economy. It was driven more by the Democrats moving to consolidate their grip on the Federal government. A case in point is the $1 billion earmarked to “improve” the census. This is Obama’s move to take the responsibility for conducting the census away from the Commerce Department and get it into the hands of his super-leftist Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Why does Obama want to do that? Because that way his Administration can exercise much more hands-on control of the counting of the 2010 census, which, as with every census, leads to the redistricting of Congress. As Joseph Stalin famously said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” Politicizing this supposed a-political process could end up giving the Democrats a real lock on power.

Now comes the Omnibus spending bill for 2009 (created in the last months of Bush’s Presidency), containing billions and billions of the pet spending projects of Congressmen and Senators called earmarks. Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag announces that Obama will sign it anyway, in spite of his pledge to reduce earmarks. “This is last year’s business. We just want to move on,” Orszag said, as if none of the horribly wasteful spending matters. By way of reassurance, the Director claimed that the Obama Administration does want “to make sure that earmarks are reduced and they're also transparent. We're going to work with the Congress on a set of reforms to achieve those." Uh-huh.

I sure hope Obama proves me wrong, but here’s what I think he will do: Make a lot of noise about reducing what will add up to a small amount of earmarks in perhaps the next fiscal budget, and then claim he’s reformed the system. I just don’t think that he’s going to come down on his Democrat cronies in the Congress, and put them on a cut-back-spending diet.

Meanwhile, the financial crisis continues apace. In this morning’s paper there was reported an announcement by FDIC head Sheila Bair that her organization may become insolvent if they do not raise the insurance fees charged banks to guarantee their (our) deposits. Ain’t that just ducky! And we thought that our CDs and savings accounts were permanently protected. . . Now, I don’t believe for a moment that the Feds will let the FDIC go under. My guess is that the FDIC will indeed raise those insurance fees, further adding to the banks’ financial burden, which will possibly prove for some of them to be the proverbial last straw. I think we will see more bank failures.

The worst of it is that in all of this the Obama Administration is determined to resurrect and follow the proven false theories of Keynesian economics. It was FDR’s adherence to these during the Great Depression of the 1930’s that delayed economic recovery for at least four years. John Maynard Keynes, a British economist popular in the 1930’s and ‘40’s contended that government could pull the economy out of a depression by spending money on infrastructure (creating jobs by building bridges, highways, dams, etc.) and printing money. He also argued for a redistribution of wealth (sound familiar?) claiming that if poor people are given money they will spend it rather than save it (a rather elitist judgment there, don’t you think?) thereby stimulating the economy. Proven by overwhelming evidence is the fact that the Great Depression was not ended, but prolonged by these policies. What provided employment and thereby ended the suffering of millions of Americans was the gearing up of the defense industry in preparation for World War II. But Obama and his boys are refusing to be taught by history.

There’s something else which is really bothering me about this Administration. Yet another administration appointee (Ron Kirk, former mayor of Dallas) has turned out to have tax problems! What is it with these people? Are there no Democrats in leadership who handle their personal financial affairs with honesty and integrity? Is Democratic Washington lacking in leaders with moral integrity? Anybody can make a mistake on a tax return. But when you fail to pay taxes on speaking engagement incomes, and deduct way too much on the cost of season tickets to Dallas Maverick games (to use examples from Kirk’s case), or when you fail to pay owed back taxes, those are not mistakes, folks – that’s tax evasion!

And speaking about the lack of moral integrity, I was reminded lately that for the eight years of the two Bush Administrations the huge pro-life throng that protests the Roe v. Wade anniversary every year in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC was always addressed by a recorded word of encouragement from the President. Not this year. There was total silence from the White House. This is a very pro-abortion President, and if he pushes through Congress the Freedom of Choice Act (as he promised to do during his campaign) the damage to the pro-life movement will be massive. That act will do away with all the parental notification laws in the various states, and will render null and void the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Bill, signed into law by President Bush.

Thinking about all this today brought to mind some verses from Proverbs:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice,
but when the wicked rule, the people groan (29:2).

When the wicked increase, transgression increases,
but the righteous will look upon their downfall (29:16). 

Though some may object to applying the word “wicked” to the Obama Administration, my fear is that as the months ahead unfold we will consider the word increasingly appropriate. I fear there is much more “groaning” ahead for America, but note that in the end, the righteous will look upon the downfall of the wicked. There is hope.  

But there’s another aspect of the Obama Administration’s doings that I want to raise. The recent news clips of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton being handed a bouquet of flowers by Syrian President Assad while she grinned like a schoolgirl made me slightly sick to my stomach. President Bush refused to have any open and public dealings with Syria, because that country is involved in the support, financing, and training of terrorists. Yet, there she is –happy as a Cheshire cat – in Damascus.  

By the way, on Hilary’s current Middle Eastern junket she has made it quite clear that the Obama Administration will insist on a separate state for Palestinian nationalists. Palestinians are not particularly interested in nation-building, of course. When the Israelis pulled out of Gaza and left them dozens of beautifully functioning greenhouses (for growing food!) they were trashed and left to rot. Rather than trying to build a life for their people they let themselves be taken over by Hamas, who simply used Gaza as a launching pad for rocket attacks on Israel.  

Nevertheless, the Administration will undoubtedly insist that the Israelis turn over the West Bank to the Palestinians for their next opportunity at a “homeland,” which will mean the eviction by force of all the Jewish squatters who have moved in there. Many of the young settlers tell reporters that this land belongs to Israelis, because the prophetic books of the Old Testament make it clear that God has given it to Israel. I certainly agree with that, and so the sight of Israeli military forcibly removing their own citizens from this land is disconcerting, to say the least. But, it is one thing if the Israelis remove people in order to comply with an agreement freely entered into with the Palestinians by the government of Israel. It is quite another if the Israelis have to evict their people because the United States has put irresistible pressure on them to concede land to the Palestinians. That would be ghastly indeed, and would bring us in danger of incurring God’s judgment for those who mess with “the apple of His eye.”  

Pondering all this, I vaguely remembered Scriptures about women and children ruling, and soon found these verses in Isaiah: 

And I will make boys their princes,
and infants shall rule over them (3:4). 

My people—infants are their oppressors,
and women rule over them (3:12). 

These verses concerning boys and infants ruling apply to the present situation, not so much in a literal sense (although women ruling clause certainly brings Hilary to mind!), but rather in the sense of naïvete? and immaturity being in charge. What I mean is this: all leftists and liberals agree in their belief of a big, fat lie – that all human beings are basically good. This, of course, categorically denies the Biblical teaching that all human beings are basically sinful and self-oriented. But, because the liberals believe this lie they think that we can negotiate with the bad guys in the world – that we can actually sit down at the table with them and convince them to change their minds about the evils they may be contemplating. They seem to think that bad guys are really just good guys who are feeling cranky, or have a bad case of indigestion, or who are mad at us because of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who everybody knows was just sooo impossible!   

Now rumor has it that we are talking to the Russians about removing our proposed missile placements in Poland (to defend against an Iranian missile launch) in exchange for their pressuring the Iranians to stop pursuing nuclear weapons. Of course, both sides hotly deny that there is any quid pro quo agreement in the works – which is a sure sign that that is precisely what is being discussed. So, let’s say that in good faith we withdraw the missiles. How then can we tell that Russia has kept her end of the bargain? How can that be measured in Iran? We probably have very few, if any, intelligence operatives in Iran.

The problem, as I see it, is this childish and naïve understanding of the way the world operates which characterizes leftist thinking. Teddy Roosevelt, who understood dealing with other nations as well as anybody in his time, famously said: “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.” In the real world, international relations are conducted on the basis of two things: the actual military and economic strength of a country (the big stick), and its resolve. President Reagan, when asked what his plan was for dealing with the Soviet Union’s threat of communist domination, replied: “Simple. We win, they lose.” The resolve was there. And coupled with America’s national strength, his determination brought about the predicted result. We won, and they lost. 

However, no modern Democrat President after LBJ (Carter, Clinton, Obama) has exhibited a similar resolve. They all seem to substitute talking for resolve. And that isn’t going to work. After the Iranians took 52 employees of our embassy in Tehran as hostages, all Carter’s talking did not win their freedom. Only the election of Ronald Reagan, and the fact that the Iranians correctly perceived that Reagan would come after them by force brought about their release. The limit of Clinton’s resolve in foreign policy was reached by the rather pathetic keep-our-distance launching of cruise missiles into Bosnia, which accomplished very little except creating rubble in the streets. And so far all Obama seems to want to do is talk. The Russians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans (in their probable upcoming missile launch) are definitely going to test Obama’s resolve. 

The lack of resolve in leaders comes from a want of moral strength. Character is built by moral strength, which in turn comes from putting God first in our lives, and prioritizing a close personal relationship with Him. Only if the center and focus of the leader’s life is to serve God and His purposes on earth can that leader truly serve others with moral strength.  

If ever moral strength, character, and the resolve to do the right thing were needed in the government of these United States, it is at the present moment. Yet, I am not seeing it. What I am seeing is self-indulgence on the part of the majority of our Representatives and Senators (with a few marvelous exceptions) and the connivance of our President.  

Pray for America.

Copyright, 2009, Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.

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