Q: This is a picture of _______________________.The answer will be at the bottom of this post. Click to enlarge if you want.
The latest reports on the children taken from the FLDS compound in Texas are that many of the boys have been sexually abused and many of the children show signs of physical abuse - bones that have been broken. If these reports turn out to be true it can't come as a big surprise. Blatantly violating the laws of God often results in an arrogance that leads into a downward spiral fueled by the flesh - "with a continual lust for more" (Eph. 4:19)). Add to that an extreme form of male entitlement fundamental to polygamy and children and women become victims of the worst of male behavior.
For dinner tonight Pam fixed a dish that included spaghetti noodles in a tomato sauce and shrimp. It was good, but I told her eating it was frustrating to the point of exhaustion. For as long as spaghetti noodles have been around you'd think someone would have invented something better suited to eating it than a fork. That's your assignment for this week. Come up with something that makes eating long, skinny, slippery noodles easier to eat.
Sunday we're going to begin a series in the book of James, sometimes called the Proverbs of the NT. This week: "Who Are These Guys?" It would be inaccurate to say the book doesn't contain any theology, but it is primarily a book about living the Christian life. It also contains the highest number of hapax legomenon in the NT. Also the greatest number of imperative verbs.
The network news tonight, at least on NBC and CBS, talked about the efforts of both Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama to reach blue collar voters. They didn't define what constitutes a blue collar voter but apparently they bowl, drink beer and ride to work in pickup trucks, all things the two democratic candidates have done recently. The candidates try their hand at these kinds of things - and typically look pretty silly in the process - because some campaign adviser told them it will help working class folk see them as "one of us" and therefore more deserving of a vote.
There's a reason Obama can't roll a 40 at the bowling alley and Hillary looks silly riding shotgun in an F 250. It's not who they are. Obama graduated from Harvard and Clinton from Yale. McCain graduated from the Naval Academy. And that's a good think in a presidential candidate.
I don't want a president who got his/her GED two years after they should have graduated from high school. And while I am a BIG fan of trade schools, I don't even want a president who completed the computer repair course at ITT Tech. I want someone who has graduated from one of the top schools in the country and excelled at their chosen profession, even if that was politics right out of the box. Those kind of people usually rose to the top while still quite young and did the kinds of things that white collar people do, like play golf, ride in a chauffeured Mercedes and drink Chablis.
Which is why a candidate doing those "blue collar activities" has always seemed to me like pandering. Does Obama really think he's going to earn anyone's vote by rolling a string of gutter balls? Or that we believe Clinton understands the working stiff because she rode in a pickup truck with a factory worker...and three Secret Service guys crammed in the rear seat?
If I was a political advisor I'd tell my candidate to stop with the stunts. If anything they only make you look more separated from blue collar voters. Instead, dump the $2,000 suit (or pant suit). You must have something more casual looking. Maybe Dockers and a golf shirt (Barak) or cotton slacks and a nice T-shirt (Hillary). Then sit down with those blue collar workers. Don't talk; don't tell them about your plan to solve their problems. Ask them to talk, and then listen. Ask them what bothers them most about the Federal Govt., what they want most for their kids, and who their heroes are.
Then let them ask you questions. Any question they want, no holds barred. If the question is inappropriately personal, tell them so, respectfully. They'll be OK with that.
My bet is that you'll walk out of there with 90% of the votes in that room.
The pic? It's a high speed photo of a bullet going through three water balloons.
1 comment:
While it is tempting to share the sentiment that candidates for president should be well-educated elites, the historical facts run counter to that intuition.
Let's examine the worst two I can think of first:
1) Jimmy Carter was educated at Georgia Tech and then the Naval Academy, where he graduated in the top ten percent of his class. He was, and remains, an abject failure as a public figure. While I feel fairly certain he is an upright man, his political judgment remains so poor that I don't think there are words to adequately describe it.
2) Woodrow Wilson graduated from Princeton, attended University of Virginia Law and later graduated with a Ph.D in political science and history from Johns Hopkins University. Wilson went on to become a professor at several distiguished colleges and universities and ultimately was appointed president of Princeton. Unfortunately, his talent for scholastic studies and a very successful tenure as leader of Princeton did not translate into success in politics.
In many ways his presidency was a failure. He took on personal management of pet projects such as the World League, severely curtailed civil liberties during the First World War, and had a particularly awful penchant for demonizing his political opponents.
There are many more men who were at the top of their game, well educated, but had poor success as president: John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Taft(think income tax) and others.
On the other hand, some of our greatest presidents either had little to no formal education or went to run-of-the-mill colleges.
They are: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman (no college at all), and Ronald Reagan to name a few.
Having said that, I don't think an objective look at the historical record can produce a correlation one way or the other between a person's educational background (or even their personal success) and their ability to lead the nation as president.
The only half-way reliable predictor of future action is embedded in a person's past reactions to circumstance, most of which are obsure to the public.
FWIW
Mike Harper
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