Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 457

Obama vs. Clintons

A feud is erupting between President Obama and Bill & Hillary Clinton.  As we saw during the Vice Presidential debate, the Obama administration is trying to blame the debacle in Libya on our intelligence agencies and the State Department.  Bill, having given Obama a big boost with his convention speech, is furious that Obama is trying to throw Hillary under the bus.  An account of the feud and what it might do from Tony Lee:

A nasty rift has opened up between President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the fallout from the terrorist attacks on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens. This feud may undermine and threaten Obama’s reelection chances.

Obama and Clinton both do not want to be held responsible for the negligence before and the cover-up after the Libya attacks. Clinton biographer Ed Klein on Friday reported that Bill Clinton, sensing Obama’s political team wants to pin legal and political blame on the State Department and Hillary Clinton, has been working on doomsday and contingency scenarios “to avoid having Benghazi become a stain on her political fortunes should she decide to run for president in 2016.”

“If relations between Obama’s White House and Hillary’s State Department rupture publicly over the growing Benghazi scandal, that could damage the Democratic ticket and dim Obama’s chances for re-election,” Klein writes.

According to Klein’s sources, Bill Clinton has assembled an informal legal team in case there are cables or other evidence that would legally implicate Hillary. Klein also told The Daily Caller that Bill has even considered advising Hillary to resign if the Obama administration tries to make her the “scapegoat.”

On Friday, there were signs the White House was preparing to do to throw Hillary Clinton and the State Department under the bus.

White House press secretary Jay Carney, when asked if Obama and Biden had “never been briefed” about the fact that more security was needed in Libya, essentially blamed the State Department, saying, “matters of security personnel are appropriately discussed and decided upon at the State Department by those responsible for it.”

Carney repeated a variation of this line throughout the press briefing.

Carney’s comments came a day after Vice President Joe Biden not only contradicted State Department officials but himself threw the intelligence community under the bus when he said the Obama administration did not know U.S. interests in Libya needed more security before the attacks and that the intelligence community changed its story after. . . .

Klein writes that the long-simmering feud between Obama and the Clintons has only gotten worse after the Democratic National Convention. The bad blood between Obama and the Clinton family dates back to the 2008 Democratic primary, and Obama’s advisers had to convince Obama to give Clinton a prominent role at the convention.

Klein writes “the latest quarrel began when Clinton heard that Obama was behaving so cocky about his first debate against Mitt Romney that he wasn’t taking his debate prep seriously.”

Clinton offered to give Obama some advice, and Obama brushed him off.

Klein writes “the former president was dumbfounded that Obama had ignored his offer, and his hurt feelings quickly boiled over into anger.”

“Bill thought that he and Obama were on friendly terms after the convention,” a source told Klein. “He couldn’t believe that the White House didn’t even extend him the courtesy of a return phone call. He concluded that Obama’s arrogance knows no bounds.”

There is no love lost between Obama and the Clintons, and they could mutually destroy their political futures in the days ahead. Team Obama could destroy Hillary Clinton’s 2016 prospects by scapegoating her for the Libya attacks. But Hillary Clinton, by potentially resigning or pointing to evidence that implicates Obama and Biden, can just as easily torpedo Obama’s chances at getting reelected.

via Libya Fallout Gives Rise to Obama-Clinton Feud.

Look for this to come out in some way in tomorrow’s presidential debate, which is supposed to focus on foreign policy.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

I would like to congratulate the 500 million citizens of the European Union for winning this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.  The same people who awarded one of the world’s greatest honors to Barack Obama upon entering office–before his Afghanistan escalation and his drone assassinations–this time gave the prize to a whole country.  Or, perhaps better, to a whole alliance of different countries.  Even though the union isn’t doing so well right now, what with the economic crisis and the common currency in jeopardy.

If the Norwegian committee that made this decision wanted to honor the European Union as a major achievement in world peace, why wouldn’t it instead honor the people who first had the idea or who implemented the alliance?  I dislike collective entities winning prizes like this, including when Time Magazine gives its “Person of the Year” award to abstractions and non-persons.  But if Norway (which is not even a member of the European Union) wants to award the $1.5 million prize in this way, that’s fine.   But that means the public could offer new kinds of nominees.   For next year, I nominate the following:

(1)  The world’s beaches (for making possible so many peaceful vacations)

(2)  The pharmaceutical industry (for inventing tranquilizers)

(3)  The United States of America (for its role in World Wars I, II, & the Cold War)

Any other nominees?  How about for the other prizes–economics, medicine, literature, etc.–which have arguably gone to individuals for far too long?

 

Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to European Union – NYTimes.com.

The agony and the ecstasy of playoffs

The baseball playoffs are on another level of sports enjoyment.  These games are not relaxing, as baseball usually is, at least if you have a favorite team in the mix.  You find yourselves fixating on every pitch.  The games are intense, suspenseful, stressful.  To be sure, they are great fun, but they are draining and exhausting.  This year, in the first round, every one of the best-of-five contests went to five games, the first time that has ever happened.

I stayed up until well after midnight watching the Washington Nationals play the St. Louis Cardinals.  The Nationals, my new home team, jumped to a 6-0 lead after three innings.  But the Cardinals chipped away.  In the 9th inning, the Nationals led by two points, 7-5.   With two outs, the reliable closer Drew Storen on the mound, though with the bases loaded, the team and its fans could taste victory, especially after two strikes to low-in-the-batting-order Daniel Descalso.  But then he hit a two-run single!  The score was tied!  Once again, Storen, letting Descalso steal a base so with runners on 1st & 3rd, had the next batter, Pete Kozma, down to the last strike.  And he got a hit, putting the Cardinals ahead 9-7 for the win!

It could have gone so many different ways.  The Cardinals had two last-bat, last-strike miracles in a row.  But then again, this is exactly the kind of things that the Cardinals did last year, over and over again, in the playoffs and then in winning the World Series.  So now I’m going to pull for the Cardinals, though I’m not sure how many games I can take.

So who won the VP debate?

Be sure to read our live blog of the Vice Presidential debate, below.  We’ve got some good punditry here.  Who do you think won the debate?   Will this turn the tide back to Obama, keep up Romney’s new momentum, have no effect, or what?

Accurate language for abortion

This “Life Quote” from Lutherans For Life was in our bulletin Sunday, strong words from apologist John Stott:

“How can we speak of the termination of a pregnancy when what we really mean is the destruction of a human life? How can we talk of therapeutic abortion when pregnancy is not a disease needing therapy and what abortion effects is not a cure but a killing? How can we talk of abortion as a kind of retroactive contraception when what it does is not prevent conception but destroy the conceptus? We need to have the courage to use accurate language. Abortion is feticide: the destruction of an unborn child. It is the shedding of innocent blood, and any society that can tolerate this, let alone legislate for it, has ceased to be civilized.”

John Stott, English Christian leader and Anglican cleric

via Lutherans For Life | Life Quotes.

The “Jesus’ wife” fragment is from the internet?

One of my favorite courses in grad school was “Bibliography and Methods,” in which we learned about the scholarship of studying manuscripts, variant texts, printing evidence, textual editing, and other kinds of hard-core old-school literary research.  One of the things you can do with this knowledge is detect forgeries.

Scholars have found that the much-hyped manuscript fragment that refers to Jesus having a wife consists basically of phrases from the already-known gnostic text known as the Gospel of Thomas.  Not only that, it replicates a mistake in the transcription that is found only in a version posted on the internet!

See Gospel of Jesus’ Wife: Forgery Confirmed? » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

Live blogging the VP debate

As we watch and comment upon the Vice Presidential debate, let’s add a drinking game.  Everyone have at hand a beverage of your choice.  (I recommend WATER.  Anything alcoholic and you might not make it to the closing statements.  Anything caffeinated and you may not get to sleep tonight.  Remember that you have to get up in the morning.)  Every time you hear one of the candidates say the following words, take a drink:

(1)  47%

(2)  $5 trillion

(3)  Big Bird

OK.  Let’s get started.  Make your comments as the debate goes along and I’ll do the same.  (Remember to keep refreshing the page so you can follow the thread.)  Gentlemen, start your engines.

 

 

 

Is the purpose of work leisure?

The New York Times published an online column arguing that the purpose of work is leisure.  (We work for the sake of the weekend; we have a career so we can retire; we try to amass wealth so we can stop working.)  That is also the view of Aristotle (we need to leisure to fully exercise our intellects) and of medieval Catholicism (the contemplative life is more spiritual than the active life).  Luther’s doctrine of vocation, by contrast, challenged this view, teaching that the purpose of work in all vocations is to love and serve one’s neighbor.

The folks at the Gospel Coalition blog asked me to pen an answer to the New York Times piece, which was by Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting.  I did.  Go here to read my response, which includes a link to Prof. Gutting’s essay:

The Purpose of Work – The Gospel Coalition Blog.

 

The “nones” as hyper-Protestants?

More from that Pew study of Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion.  It turns out that the 20% of Americans who check “none” when asked their religion are not necessarily complete secularist materialists.  Only 6% of Americans are atheists. Most of the “nones” seem to be simply people who have religious beliefs that are highly privatized.

The beliefs of the unaffiliated aren’t easy to characterize, as the Pew poll shows. The nones are far less likely to attend worship services or to say religion is important in their lives. But 68 percent say they believe in God or a universal spirit, one-fifth say they pray every day and 5 percent report attending weekly services of some kind.

via One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says – The Washington Post.

Many American Christians have little use for church authority and focus instead on “me and Jesus.”  Many American churches do little with collective doctrines or corporate identity, emphasizing their member’s individual religious experience.  Aren’t these “nones” just the next step, going from the individual’s right to interpret the Bible for himself to the individual’s right to believe anything he wants, leaving the Bible out of it?  Though the Pew study says that Protestantism has declined to a mere 48% of the American public, aren’t the “nones” really just hyper-Protestants?

The Vice Presidential debate

Tonight is the Vice Presidential debate between Republican Paul Ryan and Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.  Shall we live blog it, as we did with the first presidential debate?  Meet here at 9:00 ET.   I’ll start a new post for that.

In the meantime, we can talk about the upcoming debate here.  Will what the vice presidential candidates do in the debate matter?  We can expect Vice President Biden to learn from his boss’s lethargic performance and come out swinging.  But that is not always a pretty sight, especially from someone as gaffe-prone as Biden is.  Ryan is relatively untried on such a big stage.  He reportedly can get wonky, which may or may not play well.  What are your predictions?