Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

January 16, 2011

Paul Krugman On Talk Of "Tyranny" And "Resistance"

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 9:16 am

“Citizens of other democracies may marvel at the American psyche, at the way efforts by mildly liberal presidents to expand health coverage are met with cries of tyranny and talk of armed resistance. Still, that’s what happens whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, and there’s a market for anyone willing to stoke that anger.”

Economist Paul Krugman, New York Times, Jan. 15, 2011

It’s hard not to think of Douglas Wilson and his bandying-about of terms like “tyranny” in defining Barack Obama’s presidency and “resistance” in describing the Christian man’s “Biblically-mandated” response to it. Wilson doesn’t, of course, make ARMED resistance a necessary part of that mandate. Shamefully, though, he doesn’t forbid it — an omission that, in the superheated, angry, reckless political climate of today, and with the perpetually-aggrieved, heavily-armed, ill-informed subculture evident among his followers, is inexcusable.

I often disagree with Krugman. Here, though, I think he hits the nail on the head, both in describing the tepid, barely left-of-center politics of Barack Obama and the inflammatory, utterly-beyond-prudent posturing of a man whose classical Christian pedagogy has left him unable to grasp the difference between true tyranny and mere politics merely not to his liking.

“God loves a cheerful warrior,” Wilson writes. I think, however, that what God really loves is when men who speak in His name, after whipping up the war band, make it clear that bullets have no place in the battle. That Moscow’s Bishop of Belligerence fails to do that makes his a tyranny of enormous magnitude: The tyranny of cooperation with evil, as sinful when wrought in recklessness as it is when carefully molded by the steely embrace of bitter, bigoted flesh.

May his repentance come quickly.

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