This blog has gotten more and more political of late. For this perhaps I owe some regret, for it is somewhat time consuming and more than a bit out of my area of expertise.

That said, here, have some more politics:

Jonah Goldberg writes an article that I think does a good job of exposing some funny tendencies of the Left.

I liked these bits the best:

"There's no time here to dismantle fully the edifice of condescension and ignorance constructed by Maher and Smiley (I put Dowd in a different category). But what offends them so much about religion is that it is a source of authority outside — and prior to — politics. What has offended the Left since Marx, and American liberalism since Dewey, is the notion that moral authority should be derived from anyplace other than the state or "the people" (conveniently defined as citizens who vote liberal). Voting on values not sanctified by secular priests is how they define "ignorance." This was the real goal of Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" — to replace traditional religion with a secular one that derived its authority not from ancient texts and "superstitions" but from the good intentions of an activist state and its anointed priests. Shortly before the election, Howell Raines fretted that the worst outcome of a Bush victory would be the resurgence of "theologically based cultural norms" — without even acknowledging the fact that "theologically based cultural norms" gave us everything from the printing press and the newspaper to the First Amendment he claims to be such a defender of.

"What Maher, Raines, and Smiley fail to grasp is that all morality is based upon transcendence — or it is merely based on utilitarianism of one kind or another, and therefore it is not morality so much as, at best, an enlightened expediency or will-to-power. It is no more rational to vote based on a desire to do "good" than it is to vote based on a desire to do God's will. Indeed, for millions of people this is a distinction without a difference — as it was for so many of the abolitionists progressives and civil-rights leaders today's liberals love to invoke but never actually learn about."

I think this is a really critical point to make between liberals and conservatives. Although liberals would have you believe that they are the voice of progress and we the voice of stubborn foolishness, both groups acutally exist within the same categories, the liberals are positing ideas that have true or false values, and living by them, just like conservatives. The argument has to be about whether or not these ideas are true. "Voting on values not sanctified by secular priests is how they define "ignorance." This was the real goal of Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" — to replace traditional religion with a secular one that derived its authority not from ancient texts and "superstitions" but from the good intentions of an activist state and its anointed priests." The ideas Goldberg presents here are what I spoke of earlier in this blog when I said a vote for Kerry would be a vote for French Revolution style democracy. Their revolution scraped vainly at the Godhead, endeavouring to pull even Him down from his throne. They placed the god of reason in Notre Dame. To them, rights were given by the state, and thus the Terror was not unthinkable. People died because of beliefs like this. Beware of them.

Oh yeah, and I wrote a post earlier today that made this same point, but deleted it, because I felt it might not have shown sufficeint charity to those with whom I disagree. But here's the same idea from someone else: "I think the great irony of this election is that for all the talk of how the bigoted Right won, the Left's loss has sparked far more bigotry. Their clever trick is to defend their hatred of the religious by calling it a hatred of bigotry itself — a rationalization no liberal would tolerate from any other kind of bigot." It's true. There is more hate in Michael Moore for George Bush than for Osama Bin Laden. As Christians, our transcendent moral code dictates we must love even our enemies, and as hard as that is, I hope we can live by it.