As promised yesterday, here is the column from National Review on Clinton’s antics as Secretary of State:

​“The Clinton Revelations that Must Not Go Away” 

Lend me your ears!  I come to criticize Hillary Clinton, not to praise her.

I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, and will continue to say, that coming to the conclusion that I will vote for Clinton as the lesser of two evils is hardly an endorsement.  It’s a recognition of practical reality.  Better to know the positions of the person in power and be able to intelligently respond to those positions than to have someone running the show whose positions change every five minutes or so, and who is, I believe, dangerously unstable.  Make sure you read Dr. Thomas Sowell’s excellent article on this very subject if you have not already done so.  (I believe I posted this article over on facebook but did not include it on this page; I’ve used a different source here but the article is the same.)

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, “It might have been.”  John Greenleaf Whitter, “Maud Muller”

I had planned to write a post today on the op-ed from Jerry Falwell Jr. concerning Trump’s Churchillian leadership qualities, and I will do so tomorrow, but I was visited by a wave of nostalgia and regret as I thought about what candidates the GOP could have nominated and why they didn’t do so.

My husband asked me last night what I was trying to accomplish with these posts.  That sounds a little snarky, but he wasn’t being that way at all. It’s a perfectly fair question, especially as no one is paying me to write them.  So why do I bother?  I can easily spend a couple of hours at least on a post, and since I’m sort of retired (I guess you’d say) I have time to write these posts, and the ones over on the Intentional Happiness page, and the Behind the Music posts now that the Cherry Creek Chorale has started up again for the season, plus working on some material I’m hoping to actually sell.  Hmmm.  Maybe I’m not so retired after all.

The above title refers to  II Timothy 4:3:  “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”  I was raised in churches where the old King James Version was used, and that translation says, “after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.”  So I always had this idea that it was the teachers who had the itching ears.  But no–it’s the listeners.  They want to hear whatever scratches their itch, as we might still say today.  I love the way The Message translates verses 3-5:

You’re going to find that there will be times when people will have no stomach for solid teaching, but will fill up on spiritual junk food—catchy opinions that tickle their fancy. They’ll turn their backs on truth and chase mirages. But you—keep your eye on what you’re doing; accept the hard times along with the good; keep the Message alive; do a thorough job as God’s servant.

I’ve been meaning for some weeks now to parse out the whole Supreme Court issue, as this one question is for many people the deciding straw on the camel’s back that forces them to vote for Donald Trump.  As Trump himself said in a recent speech, people who don’t like him “have to” vote for him anyway.  Why?  Supreme Court Justices.  The common refrain is that whoever becomes President would be able to appoint at least three judges and possibly four or even more, thus changing the makeup of the Supreme Court for a generation to come.  So, even if you fear and despise Donald Trump, you have to save the US Constitution by voting for him, goes the reasoning.  I listened to part of a podcast just this morning hosted by the conservative talk-show radio host Hugh Hewitt talking to a high-minded conservative scholar who was spouting this very rhetoric.  Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, was being very critical of NeverTrumpers who say, well, you can’t trust Trump to do what he says (a view amply justified just this week by Trump’s shifts/backpedaling/”softening” on his whole ridiculous immigration policies).  I don’t get it.  Of course you can’t trust him!  But even if you knew for sure that Donald Trump would, if elected, appoint solid-gold, dyed-in-the-wool originalist justices (not “judges,” as he keeps calling them), you still would have no assurance that he would really get to put those people on the Court.  Here’s why:

Yet another thoughtful, thought-provoking article from Thabiti Anyabwile on this whole issue of voting for the lesser of two evils. I can’t urge you strongly enough to read his stuff! I started out these Facebook posts with his original articles on the election. They are long but impeccably written and show a love for God, His word, and the Gospel. We were members of the same church (Capitol Hill Baptist Church) as Thabiti during our time in Northern Virginia, and he served as elder at CHBC for several years. I have heard him preach a number of times. His sincerity and eagerness to engage on difficult topics are exemplary. We cannot hide behind party labels in this election, nor can we just stay home.

“Always Get More than One Estimate”

I attended a showing of the latest D’Souza film this past weekend after waiting in vain for it to end its run and come out on YouTube.  (I was perfectly willing to pay to see it online, just to be clear.)  But my husband was out of town, and I was tired of working around the house, and I really wanted to write about the movie, so I went.  I couldn’t even use the King Soopers coupons we usually buy, as there were no more showings at AMC theaters, so I had to pay full price.  No one can say that I saw the movie in any sort of backhanded way!

Where to begin?  As I said yesterday on another D’Souza topic, there’s so much material out there already that there’s no need for me to regurgitate it here.  What I’m really interested in, again, is the way in which human beings are always willing to hear what they want to hear, to interpret ideas in light of their own ideologies. (Interesting conversation with my brother-in-law over the weekend: He was saying that he’s heard any number of interpretations assigned to The Matrix, the movie positing that all existence may just be a dream. Or something. I’m not terribly good at following that type of thing, having had to watch the movie Inception four times before I finally felt that I had any sort of grasp on it.  Anyway, Ed said that he’s heard Christians talk about how The Matrix is really based on Christian ideas, and a Buddhist talk about its Buddhist ideas, and I think maybe an atheist talk about its atheism . . . you get the picture.)

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I stopped yesterday’s post with a description of  D’Souza’s 2007 book The Enemy at Home, which blames the American “cultural left” for the 9/11 attacks.  Hoo-boy!  Fast-forward to 2012, when he released his first film 2016:  Obama’s America based on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.  By this time in his life D’Souza had become quite a conservative celebrity; in 2010 he had been asked to take on the leadership of King’s College, a historically Protestant institution, an appointment that ended in 2012 after he had been caught in what certainly seemed to be an adulterous relationship.  I’m not really all that interested in re-hashing the details of the scandal.  To me the most important point of the whole sad story comes with D’Souza’s statement that he didn’t know it was considered wrong to be engaged to one woman while married to another.  (And, as it turned out, the woman he was involved with was also married at the time.)  He . . . didn’t know it was considered wrong?  As I often say, “Wh-a-a-a-t?”