The Big O. is “yet another president elevating personal quirks into a management style,” says the personal-quirk-oriented Maureen Dowd, picking on him for not coming up with her version of a good manager.

She bemoaned predecessors GW Bush, Clinton, LBJ, and Nixon’s acting out in and from the White House — no Carter, note — but expected of this “psychologically healthy” Obama (this from a book she read).

He was “dazzling” as a politician but is “obdurately self-destructive about politics.” 

He is guilty of

failing to understand that Americans are upset that a series of greedy corporations have screwed over the little guy without enough fierce and immediate pushback from the president.

So this leftist commentator wants a tough guy in the White House.  I do too, but toughness is for beating back the many-tentacled bureaucracy that a president inherits.  Forget about it: he’s one of them.  He loves power.

But as I have said before, God writes straight (sometimes) with crooked lines, and the Dowd critique is quotable even allowing for her crookedness.  In his speech last night:

He appointed a “son of the gulf” spill czar and a new guard dog at M.M.S. and tried to restore a sense of confident leadership — “The one approach I will not accept is inaction” — and compassion, reporting on the shrimpers and fishermen and their “wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost.” He acted as if he was the boss of BP on the issue of compensation. And he called on us to pray.

A new last refuge for scoundrels here: prayer.

The rest is to the point, that he’s over his head in spilt oil, crying over it when he should . . .   What?

Waive the union-protective Jones Act, say people who also want action, among other things.  God, after all, helps those who help themselves, said B. Franklin (not God) in his 1736 version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, but Jewish wise men, Sts. Augustin and Ignatius Loyola and others have told us to pray as if all depended on God, act as if it all depended on us.

Assuming you really want that oil mopped up and do not approach it as an opportunity to rail at big business.

Robert Benne and Gerald McDermott in Christianity Today, Feb. ’04 picked apart arguments for gay marriage, including that it does no harm to society, calling it “a superficial kind of individualism that does not recognize the power of emerging social trends that often start with only a few individuals bucking conventional patterns of behavior.”

Gay marriage is defended as not harming marriage in the short run.  The authors recall the ’60s, “when illegitimacy and cohabitation were relatively rare” and “we were asked, whom do these individuals hurt?”

Now we know the negative social effects these two living arrangements have spawned: lower marriage rates, more instability in the marriages that are enacted, more fatherless children, increased rates of domestic violence and poverty, and a vast expansion of welfare state expenses.

That said, the authors cite three reasons why “the institutionalization of gay marriage” would be bad for marriage, children, and society. 

The first is that it would change “the definition of marriage.”  Such a “scrambling” would be “shock to our fundamental understanding of human social relations and institutions.”

Gays are less faithful, for one thing.  “There is more likely to be a greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman,” wrote gay marriage proponent Andrew Sullivan in his 1996 book, Virtually Normal, approvingly.  “Something of the gay relationship’s necessary honesty, flexibility, and equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds,” he added.

Or, as Metropolitan (gay) Church founder Troy Perry told The Dallas Morning News, “Monogamy is not a word the gay community uses.”  For them fidelity calls for “a loving, caring, honest relationship,” in which honesty matters most. “Some would say that committed couples could have multiple sexual partners as long as there’s no deception.”

Even (legally) “married” gays in Netherland have an average of eight partners per year outside their relationship, according to a study made shortly before this article appeared.  “Gay marriage will change marriage more than it will change gays,” commented the authors.

“Further,” they add, gay marriage will provide a wedge for societal acceptance of marriage among more than two partners, or such is the goal of some proponents.

Law Professor Martha Ertman of the University of Utah, for example, wants to render the distinction between traditional marriage and “polyamory” (group marriage) “morally neutral.” She argues that greater openness to gay partnerships will help us establish this moral neutrality.

And

University of Michigan law professor David Chambers wrote in a widely cited 1996 Michigan Law Review piece that he expects gay marriage will lead government to be “more receptive to [marital] units of three or more.”

More to come, including sharp rejoinders from opponents to the authors’ position.

Astute Reader J from the NW Side:

Attended a Seniors Club luncheon . . . at a Northwest Side parish where [Rep.] Mike Quigley [D.-IL] was the unannounced [italics added] speaker. [I liken it to a black alderman requiring time in a Baptist pulpit.]

I was two minutes late into his talk, and missed his introduction, but what I heard was revolting:

[F]ifty-five thousand nuns supported the health care bill (nothing about the USCB); insurance and drug companies supported the Republicans and they have lied and lied in order to scare “you”; there will be no such thing as 500 billion dollars in cuts to medicare; look how terrific social security is, and medicare, and the Republicans opposed it for years, even Ronald Reagan, who later said he wouldn’t touch medicare.

he said “Change is difficult.” Michelle Obama likes to peddle this condescending crapola, too.

The progressives appear to be softening us up for some re-education programs. Come to think of it, that is their idea of “the Future.”

 

Mr. Q. ended by saying he is soon off to Cuba to learn how to make things here as good as possible for “us.”

Because I was late, and a guest, I didn’t ask any questions of the congressman. I just glared across the table at his fawning assistant with a camera. I did not applaud.

These seniors are tough in their own way. [The luncheon organizers] took a survey of guests at check-in and advised Mr. Q. that seventy-plus percent opposed the health bill. His answer was, it’s too late, it passed, get used to it.