In the previous post I went to some lengths to point out just how absurd it is for liberals to wail and gnash their teeth about Fox News (which actually attempts to live up to its “fair and balanced” positioning statement) all the while MSNBC has hyper-partisan, Obama-cheerleader hacks like Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews assigned to anchor their election coverage desk.

Apparently some saving remnant of old-school journalists at NBC could bear the embarrassment no longer. Less than 48 hours after my post (not that there is any linkage . . . BWR isn’t that powerful . . . yet) comes the news that Olbermann and Matthews are being removed.

Actually, however, I suspect that Stephen Spuriell over at NRO’s “Media Blog” is correct. Olbermann didn’t get replaced because he was too liberal. He was yanked for being too much of a horse’s posterior to his collegaues:

. . . while I’d love to take some credit here, I think it had a lot more to do with Keith Olbermann’s outrageous behavior toward his colleagues during the week of the Democratic convention. What is most objectionable about Olbermann is not his politics but his attitude. He has to be a jerk about everything. By all accounts, his rising popularity went to his head and he started pulling the same stunts he is notorious for pulling at every other place he has worked: treating everyone around him like dirt and pushing the envelope further and further on the air.

Some loosely-connected observations . . .

* Sarah Palin . . .The surprise pick exposed a putrid sea of ugliness that usually stays hidden beneath a thin fog of smiling condescension on the Left.The fact is, there is a wide streak of self-righteous viciousness running through much of the left-liberal culture in this country–one that has no real corollary on the right. Both elements (the self-righeousness and the viciousness) were on spectacular display in the first 72 hours following McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

The viciousness is perpetually present at places like The Daily Kos, The Democratic Underground, The Huffington Post, and in Keith Olbermann’s spittle-flecked, rage-fueled “Special Comments.” But it was the accompanying sense of self-justifying holy purity that was particularly striking this week.

Here, for example, are two commenters at the Daily Kos explaining why unfairly destroying Bristol Palin was a righteous act:

I am prepared to do whatever is necessary to destroy the Republican Party as it exists today as well as everything it stands for.If health insurance for all, an end to the Iraq War, an end to torture and illegal wiretapping, and a sane energy policy can be obtained at the price of destroying one teenage girl, her family, and the surrendering our self-respect I see that as a cheap trade.Go talk about nobility of purpose to those 4,000+ dead American soldiers in Iraq.

And this commenter chimed in in agreement:

This is about Power . . . How it is obtained—and how it is wielded in ways that affects all of us.Are you telling me that you would not use character-destroying lies to ensure a war against Iran does not occur? Are you telling me you would not spread lies about a man’s integrity, even if it defeated a candidate who take away the right to choose? Are you telling me you would not destroy the love a family holds for one another, even if it meant letting someone who would destroy the constitution become president?

None of use would use these tactics in a perfect world. It is not a perfect world. It is a fallen world. We have to judge costs and benefits, not moral absolutes. I know this is the way to fanaticism and destruction—believe me I do. But, when we face opponents such as the ones we face . . . what else is there for us to do? What choice do we have?

When faced with monsters, we have to be monstrous ourselves.

(emphasis added; hat tip: Joseph Bottum at First Things)

These comments reflect refreshing honesty. They also duplicate perfectly the reasoning of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung.  (Vladmir Lenin’s famous response to causing the deaths of innocent people was to shrug: “If you want to make an omelette, one must be willing to break a few eggs.” Self-righteous viciousness, you see, has been around a while.

Over at the excellent site “First Things,” Jonathan Last wonders “Why They Hate Her” and comes up with four pretty revealing reasons. In summary they are:

1. Trig Palin’s Down’s Syndrome is a challenge to their ideas about what represents worthwhile life.
2. Palin’s family is a double-rebuke to the culture of abortion.
3. She is a lifelong Christian who belongs to an evangelical church. No further explanations should be needed about the provocations which emanate there from.
4. Finally, there’s the fertility. The Palin family’s five children would have been unexceptional forty years ago, but today constitute something of a fertility freak show.

Do read the whole thing.

* Evangelicals . . . Many lefties were genuinely perplexed when evangelical Christians didn’t immediately denounce Sarah Palin for failing to have her daughter bound and dragged into the town square for a good public flogging after she turned up pregnant. (See, for example, Newsweek’s Sally Quinn in the first paragraph here.)

The source of that expectation? Many have clearly begun to believe the Hollywood scriptwriter- caricature of how evangelical Christians think. They’ve been portraying Christians as humorless, puritanical, heartless scolds for so long, they’ve actually begun to believe their own propaganda. Thus, they’re genuinely startled when Christians behave like . . . well, Christ–compassionate, forgiving, redemptive.

*FNDS (Fox News Derangement Syndrome)Lefties sincerely rationalize that Keith Olbermann is just their answer to Bill O’Reilly. Few seem evenly vaguely aware of the following:

• O’Reilly isn’t a so much a conservative as he is an old-school populist.
•  O’Reilly is only rarely as worked up, humorless and mean as Olbermann is in “default mode.”
• O’Reilly seeks and invites people who disagree with him to appear on his show. Olbermann almost never. And most importantly . . .
• Fox News doesn’t let O’Reilly within a mile of its straight news coverage and analysis of the election. That’s left to a world-class team of serious journalists and pundits that includes fomer ABC White House correspondent Brit Hume (right-leaning), the encyclopedic and universally respected Michael Barone (right-leaning), Fred Barnes (right-leaning), Mortaon Kondracke (left-leaning), Mara Liason (left-leaning), Juan Williams (left-leaning).
• MSNBC, in contrast, sticks Olbermann–a former sportscaster and current blogger for the hyper-liberal/nutball “Daily Kos”–front and center in its supposedly serious election coverage. Around him you’ll find Chris Matthews (left-leaning), David Schuster (left-leaning), Andrea Mitchell (left-leaning), and Tom Brokaw (left-leaning). At least  Brokaw knows to be embarrassed by the presence of a ultra-partisan hack like Olbermann on a serious news set.

Tim Graham at NRO rightly calls Olbermann “the nation’s televised face of sneering, drooling Bush hatred.” So, tell me again how Olbermann is the liberal corollary of Bill O’Reilly?

* * *

Following Al Gore’s close loss to Bush in the 2000 election, the dominant media elites went to great lengths to assure the election of John Kerry in 2004. The tactics included the nearly-successful fabrication of the infamous “fake but true” Air National Guard memo on the eve of the voting. Overall, however, these elites avoided crossing certain lines with an eye toward maintaining semi-plausible deniability of bias.

This time, all pretense of objectivity and fairness has been cast aside. This is war. Supposedly respectable publications like Time and Newsweek have put Obama on the cover so many times now it’s starting to get embarrassing.  Trashy rags like Us and Rolling Stone are doing their part, too. Oprah has put the full weight of her star-making machinery into the cause. Of course, the network news organizations can always be counted on to spend what little credibility they have left to advance the preferred narratives.

With President Bush’s popularity ratings still in the cellar, these folks thought they had the White House in the bag just a few weeks ago. Now with the polls tightening they are facing the very real possibility of losing yet again. And this is inducing a incendiary mix of panic, rage and desperation.

In other words. . get ready. It’s going to get ugly. Very ugly.

Mrs. Blather has done, and is doing, an extraordinary job of restoring a sense of normality to our lives and making this strange new house feel like our home. I have tried–mostly in vain–to keep projects moving forward through short bursts of work in between heavy lifting-fests.

Throughout this process, some dear people have gone far above and beyond call of Christian brotherhood/sisterhood. They have packed, cleaned, cooked, painted, hauled, carried, loaded, lifted, stacked and much more.

In a season in which it became absurdly obvious that we have way, way too much stuff, it turns out the more important revelation is that our real wealth lies in something else we’ve accumulated over the last 20 years. True friends. We’re no longer in Bedford. But like George Bailey in Bedford Falls, it seems we’re the richest folks in town.

Thank you.

I’m in full agreement with this reaction by Hugh Hewitt. I like the pick.

There is a remarkable book review by Michael Kochin over at The Claremont Institute’s site. The review is of David Gelentner’s new book, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion.

An excerpt of the review:

Americans aim to serve the God of the Old Testament as interpreted by Jesus and his apostles in the New Testament. Here the central teaching of Jesus, at least for the aspects of the American religion that interest Gelernter, is the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), which Gelernter doesn’t cite even though it, too, is echoed in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. The Good Samaritan, as Martin Luther King, Jr., expounded in his final speech, is the man who, in a dangerous and forlorn place, asked not, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” but “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” This is the American missionary spirit: “When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho,” said President Bush in his first inaugural, “we will not pass to the other side.” It is this teaching that still summons medical missionaries to perform eye operations in the slums of Mombasa or calls Princeton graduates to serve as riflemen in Iraq’s Anbar province.

Gelernter calls this self-sacrifice for others “chivalry.” He is right that knightly metaphors partially explain American efforts to bind up the wounds of the world. Think of Eisenhower’s “Crusade in Europe,” or Reagan’s crusade against Communism. Yet as Gelernter himself points out, the knight engages in acts of knightly virtue to justify his claim to be mounted while others walk. The Americans who fought their way from Omaha Beach to Dachau or who held the Chinese army to a bloody stalemate in Korea did so not as crusading knights aiming to justify their privileges before God, but from a sense of what was necessary for their own security—out of love for their neighbors at home—as well as out of love for their neighbors abroad, fallen under the oppression of idolatrous despotisms.

Americans, like the Good Samaritan, do not feel that their strength, health, and prosperity have to be justified as privileges. These are not privileges but blessings, worldly marks of divine favor, given to all those who serve God by loving their neighbor as themselves after the fashion of the Good Samaritan, who act not out of noblesse oblige but out of sheer neighborliness, out of the equality they recognize in the sufferer. Inquiring into the impulse behind American intervention in the protracted 20th century crisis of civilization, Gelernter asks rhetorically whether “Christianity did indeed help save the world,” but he does not explain what aspect of the Gospel’s teaching led to this apparently Christian intervention.

Do read the whole review. It made me want to add Gelentner’s book the tall stack of books I plan to get around to reading some day soon.

I would now like to apologize to everyone. In the world.

That’s roughly how many people I’m disappointing, annoying or exasperating right now.

And the great move of 2008 is really only halfway complete. It took precisely one week to pack and move the contents of stately Holland manor into four extra-large pods. And I was pretty much completely off-line work-wise for that entire week. Dear Lord in heaven, what a beating. And we can’t move into the new place for a few more days.

In the interim, the five of us are living with kind relatives like Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl in some sad Steinbeck novel.

Meanwhile, people all over the civilized world are waiting for me to produce things they’ve paid me good money to create. So to all of you I say again: “I’m sorry. . . so very sorry.”

And to myself I say: “Stop bellyaching you big baby. This isn’t ‘hard.'”

Good people do genuine, real-deal “hard” all the time.

I know a couple at church who got the news from the obstetrician that their newborn baby girl had Down’s Syndrome and was profoundly deaf. They bounced back quickly from the shock and disappointment and have found her a source of astonishing joy.

Hard?

I have a friend with three teenage daughters (just like me) who found himself standing by the caskets of two of them a couple of years back right in the middle of the Thanksgiving holidays. He and his sweet wife pressed into God and, by His grace and comfort, found ways to carry on, be productive, do Kingdom work, and even smile again.

As I said, in this fallen world too many good people do “hard” with too great a frequency.

This? This is just momentary, light obnoxiousness. But to all those innocent folks being affected by it. . . bear with me. This too shall pass.

We moved into this house seven years ago last month. The heat index was about 105 the day we moved in. It was roughly the same as Mrs. Blather and I spent the day moving the contents of the garage into the portable “Pod” storage container that had been dropped at the foot of our driveway this morning.

Pod #2 is delivered on Thursday. #3 on Saturday. And #4, if necessary, on Monday. We close on the sale of our home on Tuesday.

I’m not sure what it’s like to move in mild, pleasant weather. We moved to Minneapolis from Oklahoma City in January of 1994. The daytime high the day we arrived was 18 below zero. We moved to Texas at the end of June of 1999, and the temps were crazy hot. Today, absolutely ridiculous amounts of sweat poured out of me. Changed clothes twice.

We do have a place to move, I’m happy to report. As I explained in this post, we have decided to rent for a while. But finding a place to lease that will accommodate the five of us, all our furniture, and four cars turned out be a challenge. But we are reminded that God is rarely early but He is always on time. A great place popped onto the market a few days ago and the location couldn’t be better.

We’ll be in the new place in a week and a day. No sweat. (Well, maybe a little.)

Roger Kimball, a hyper-literate guy and the editor of one of my favorite journals–The New Criterion–made a chilling observation about yesterday’s events. An excerpt:

But I suspect that in the years to come what most historians–and perhaps the rest of us, too–will think of when we hear the date August 8, 2008 is not China, and certainly not old what’s-his-name with the hair, the mistress, and pathetic claims of being “99 percent honest“. What we’ll think of is the country of Georgia and we’ll realize that August 8 was the date when Russia began reassembling the former Soviet empire in earnest.

When Russian tanks and troops poured into the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia yesterday, it was not, as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said, part of a “peacekeeping mission.” It was part of an imperialist mission whose undeclared goal is to reabsorb the whole of Georgia–West-leaning Georgia with its critical oil pipeline supplying energy to an increasingly thirsty Europe–into mother Russia.

You can read the whole thing here.

I mentioned recently that my gut tells me we’re in for some interesting times in the next 12 months or so. Perhaps those “interesting” times began yesterday.

Long before the ubiquitous and long-running “Got Milk” ad series by those Dairy Association folks, there was a famous ad campaign back in the seventies for the Great Lakes Mink Association that featured various celebrities sporting a beautiful fur coat.

These ads were usually placed on the back cover of upscale women’s magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The legendary double-entendre tag line was “What becomes a legend most?” Here’s an example from early in the 10 year campaign:

Lately I’ve been reminded of that classic campaign as I’ve pondered this question: What are the most definitive marks of Christian maturity? Or: What should a child of God look for in his or her own life as an indicator that they have grown spiritually?

In other words: What becomes a believer most?

I have settled on two rare traits thatI believe will be consistently in evidence in the life of any truly mature Christian. It is not how many Bible verses one knows; how often one is in church; or how many “don’ts” one consistently abstains from. They tell-tale traits are:

1. The capacity for unselfishness.
2. The ability to remain peaceful and at rest in a severe test.

Not to point fingers, throw stones, or notice eye-specks or anything, but I’ve noticed that these two traits can be conspicuously absent in folks who have been “in the Way” for a long, long time. Here in my 40th year of sainthood, I’m wondering if I’m as highly developed on those two counts as I should be.

Look through the Gospels at the occasions in which Jesus expressed disappointment or frustration at his disciples and you’ll find it is almost always because they were being self-absorbed or were freaking out in a stressful situation. The longer they hung with Him, the more He expected them to be securely others-oriented and calm in a crisis.

For the mature Christian, self-absorption and fearfulness are simply . . . unbecoming.

The hawks were vocal and present early this morning when I went outside to do my pool chores.

However, at some point between then and the time I returned home in the late afternoon, having a pair of hawks in residence in the backyard lost all of its charm for Mrs. Blather. For one thing, all of our familiar bird friends who frequent our patio bird feeder were staying the heck away. The mated pair of cardinals that have been pretty much a permanent fixture at the feeder since January are nowhere to be seen.

Then Mrs. Blather saw one of the hawks finishing off a meal of some poor creature from our private backyard ecosystem; and that was it. Apparently she grabbed a skimmer net on a long pole and with a mighty hand drove the wing-ed invaders from our domain. (Possibly violating several federal statutes if they were a protected species.)

They have stayed gone, too–obviously considering the enticement of fresh water and abundant squirrels and lizards not worth the risk of being attacked by a crazy woman with a net.

This backyard is once again a raptor-free zone.