I have ordered Speaker Gingrich's book and will be writing up a short review on it at some point in the next few weeks.

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Spending money that doesn't belong to you, and more to the point, we don't have, is immoral. Taxes and spending are moral issues. There's no way around it.

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." –G.K. Chesterton The Speaker, 12/15/00

Wisdom and insight can come from the strangest of places.  A line in a movie, a lyric in a song, or a voice from the car-seat in the back of a minivan can open the eyes of your mind to new, profound truths and realizations about life, love, and faith.  These revelations are occasionally delivered most clearly from people who disagree most vehemently with you and your worldview.

But you have to be listening, you need to be cultivating a reflective and vibrant inner thought life, to hear the wisdom that is lurking all around you; wisdom that wants to be set free from the chains of ignorance we’ve placed on it (or on each other).

Joseph Martin McCabe was born in Macclesfield, England 143 years ago.  As a younger man he entered the priesthood, but six years later, and after a “loss of faith”, McCabe became an ardent critic of religion, a “devout” atheist, and prolific secular author in the first half of the 20^th century.  He became a defender and promoter of nearly everything a religious conservative like me disagrees with.

But what McCabe offered in his writing, what attracted the attention (and garnered the respect) of the legendary British Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, was an ability to see the seriousness of the debate between people of faith and secular materialists, and a willingness to acknowledge and discuss the implications of both side’s worldview to society and civilization.

Chesterton, in his classic work Heretics (1905), quotes a lengthy passage from an essay McCabe had written earlier that same year entitled “Christianity and Rationalism on Trial.”  Chesterton had been attacked for being too humorous and light-hearted in his writings on “serious” topics, but being the Happy Warrior he was, Chesterton used the opportunity of a chapter in his own book not to personally attack McCabe, but to in large part highlight (and applaud) the refreshing clarity an atheist like McCabe had to offer to even those of us in the “God-fearing” camp.

Here is what Joseph McCabe wrote:

But before I follow Mr. Chesterton in some detail I would make a general observation about his method.  He is as serious as I am in his ultimate purpose, and I respect him for that.  He knows, as I do, that humanity stands at a solemn parting of the ways.  Towards some unknown goal it presses through the ages, driven by an overmastering desire of happiness.  Today it might hesitate, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how momentous the decision may be.  Western civilization is, apparently, deserting the path of religion and entering upon the path of secularism.

Will it lose itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and suffer through years of civic and economic anarchy, only to learn it had lost the road, and must return to religion?

Or will it find that at last it is leaving the mists and quagmires behind it; that it is ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and making straight for the long-sought Utopia?

This is the drama of our time, and every man and woman should understand it

Wow.

I feel as Chesterton presumably did more than 100 years ago when he first read those same words: Where is that type of candid, honest, call-to-intellectual-and-moral-arms among believers in the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible today?  Where do we hear and read this brand of candid, sober, exceptional reflection among religious conservatives (of any faith) in modern discourse?

Answer: basically, we don’t.  We can count on one hand the public figures in recent memory who, regardless of your opinion of their views, clearly, accurately, and fairly described the parameters of the various cultural battles that impact us all.

Watch one such example here:

Last week I wrote about the need Center-Right Americans have to re-engage the political, legal, and economic realms we’ve abandoned for far too long (and to re-engage in the right, thoughtful way).  I stand by those words and intend on doing my small part in helping to facilitate a conservative renaissance in my sphere of influence.  But a dear friend of mine reminded me this past weekend that the way to help a group of land-locked people to see they need to build a boat isn’t simply to hand out lists of instructions and schematics.  Certainly technical knowledge, pertinent facts, and a helping heaping of elbow grease are required for any endeavor to succeed, but the trickle will turn into a flood of interest in ship-building when those land-lubbers have instilled in them an unquenchable thirst for the open sea.

The penetrating words of Joseph McCabe above could not be more applicable still today as they were in 1905 (in England, no less).  Applied to the United States of 2010, we are confronted with divergent worldviews at nearly every turn of life.

For the religious American: you have highly motivated and well-funded entities intent on eradicating God from the public square.  For the conservative and libertarian proponents of limited-government and fiscal discipline: you have unfettered and unprecedented increases is the size, scope, and waste of the federal government at the behest of agents of both Parties (although unquestionably more so among Democrats).  For defenders of the sanctity of life: you have more than 50 million murdered babies since 1974.  For those who recognize the fundamental importance of traditional marriage and the family: you have activist courts and their cohorts in the media and academia doing everything they can to shame your perspective into silence, and are willing to circumvent the law if necessary to achieve their society-altering goals.

How, if any of these issues matter to you in the least, can you not be moved to action?  How can you continue to look the other way as your kids are indoctrinated by people with ideas that conflict with what you hold to be most dear?  What will it take to convince you to begin reading, to being educating yourself, to begin entering the voting booth every other November equipped with something more than “a hunch about this candidate”?

I’m not talking about uniformed unity on every issue.  I’m not suggesting that there needs to be one spokesman or one plan to fix all of society’s ills.  But there are certain core values and principles and beliefs that, when under attack, rightly rouse in us the desire to defend them.  They ought to rouse us.

To our own detriment, we have attributed to our ideological opponents the same benign intentions the average law-abiding, tax-paying citizen have: To be left alone to raise their family, conduct their business, and worship their God in peace.  We mistakenly think that Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich basically want the same end-goals for America, but just disagree with each other on the means (and that disagreement is based almost entirely in petty politics).  This is wrong.

Liberty and freedom are not compatible with top-down government control and social engineering.  The enslaving of people onto the welfare plantation, regardless of the intentions of the parties responsible, is not compatible with real justice and compassion.  Equality of Opportunity is not compatible with an unobtainable, stubborn, and arbitrary insistence upon Equality of Outcome.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself.  One thing at a time.  Here at A Voice in the Wilderness I will continue to highlight particular, specific issues and stories with the intent to expose their connection to some of the bigger concepts and principles that “Mere Conservatism” embodies.  The devil is in the details, as they say.

But from time to time, and perhaps for the first time, people need to catch a glimpse of what we’re fighting for, who we’re fighting, and why remaining in the shadows of indifference and ignorance is really no option at all.

Two men, Chesterton and McCabe, with wholly different worldviews and belief-systems, were able to pin-point the crux of the culture war that rages still today and come away with a healthy respect for one another.  They grasped the seriousness of their disagreement and found ways to hate the other side’s ideas without hating the individuals on the other side.  We can do the same with the political, religious, and secular Left in 2010.

Only if we’re all honest about the stakes involved, that is.

Are you getting thirsty, yet?

Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as "unsustainable." So let's make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in "Spaceballs" (which seems the appropriate comparison) called "Ludicrous Speed."

Steyn continues:

Obama's spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that's according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won't be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

You really must understand something: Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank deeply believe in top-down socialism.  Barack Obama isn't a bad guy; he's just flat-out wrong when it comes to economic policy.

Steyn later quotes from an Associated Press news story that does its best to defend that same counter-intuitive policy the president insists on employing:

"WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs."

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget "freeze spending"? And where's the president getting all this money to "pour" into his "fight" against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn't need so much money to "pour" away?

Bingo, Mark.  Bingo.

When you ignore people like the Tea Party protesters as long as CNN has, don't expect to be welcomed with open arms when you do finally show up.

From the Associated Press:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius demonstrates how to cough while making remarks before President Barack Obama's national broadcast address to students, at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a Taliban takeover in Kandahar and perhaps Kabul, would plunge Afghanistan into another civil war infinitely bloodier than what we have now. Withdrawal would force Islamabad to abandon its war on terror and again come to terms with its own militants, as it did in the 1990s. Only this time, it wouldn't be clear who is patron and who is client. Withdrawal would give Pakistan's jihadists the freedom to shift fronts to India, with all the nightmare scenarios that entails. Withdrawal would invite the al Qaeda remnant in Iraq—already on an upswing—to redouble its efforts, and do so with the confidence that the U.S. has permanently soured on Middle Eastern interventions.

This is a partial list. The alternative is a winding and bloody struggle to defend and improve a hapless and often corrupt government in a godforsaken land of often (though by no means pervasively) ungrateful people. This is not the noblest fight, and no sane nation would wage it by choice. But we did not choose it and, if we keep our nerve, we can win it. Otherwise, the consequence will be ashes flying again in our own streets, something to remember on the eve of another 9/11 anniversary.

Read the full article here.

Now Mr. Steyn has followed that performance up with a fantastic column on the problem President Obama keeps running in to: himself.

The president’s strategy on January 20 was to hurl all the vast transformative spaghetti at the wall — stimulus, auto nationalization, cap’n’trade, health care — and make it stick through the sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the American people aren’t finding it quite so charismatic, and they’re beginning to spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan hopeychangey rhetoric and the budget-busting prosperity-throttling future-beggaring big-government policies.

No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America’s schoolchildren is to suggest what you’d like him to do in his next speech. Here’s mine: Call in sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president’s speech.

Here's a perfect example of the spectacular work Steyn does when filling in for El Rushbo:

Don't worry...he's only one of the privileged few who are allowed access to our president.

Let's see what Mr. Charles Krauthammer thinks of Van Jones, the "Green Czar".

Where do I find a single woman like this?

Despite her perhaps over-zealous delivery, this woman just made one of the strongest cases for the kind of common sense, free market solutions most Americans inherently recognize as being...well...American.