The Purpose-Driven Left

[outdeep]

If you don't like sarcastic wit, you probably won't like Coulter.  However, the story of the woman and her assialant  is indeed true.
 
-Dave
 
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The purpose-driven left
Ann Coulter
April 7, 2005

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/ac20050407.shtml

It's been a tough year for the secularist crowd. There was Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," the moral values election, the Christian hostage subduing her kidnapper by reading from "The Purpose-Driven Life," and the Christian effort to save Terri Schiavo. Not only that, but earlier this year Dr. James Dobson insulted the Democrats' mascot, SpongeBob SquarePants, with impunity.

And now, for all the hullabaloo in the media, you'd think the pope had died.

 
The liberal take on Catholicism is that it's a controversial religion because of its positions on abortion, sodomy and various other crucial planks of the Democratic platform (curiously, positions that are shared by all three of the world's major religions).

In defense of the Catholic Church's most "controversial" position (meaning "contrary to the clearly stated opinion of CNN"), I wanted to return to a story from a few weeks ago that passed from the headlines far too quickly. The "controversial" Catholic position is the ban on girl priests.

I'll leave it to the Catholics to explain the theological details, but we have a beautiful pair of bookmarks to the exact same incident illustrating women's special skills and deficits. The escape and capture of Brian Nichols shows women playing roles they should not (escorting dangerous criminals) and women playing roles they do best (making men better people).

Nichols' murderous rampage began when he took the gun from a 5-foot-tall grandmother who was his sole guard at the Fulton County Courthouse. It ended when an otherwise unremarkable 26-year-old woman appealed to the Christian conscience of this same violent killer holding her hostage.

At 2 a.m. one Saturday night, Ashley Smith went out for cigarettes while unpacking her new apartment, yet another victory for tobacco pleasure. Returning from the store, Smith was grabbed by a man at her front door, who put a gun in her side and told her not to scream. He asked if she knew who he was. When he removed his baseball cap, she saw it was Nichols, the dangerous fugitive all over television who had escaped custody during his rape trial and had killed four people in the previous 48 hours. (Although he also looked a lot like of one the guys on "American Idol.")

In Smith's apartment, Nichols bound Smith's feet and hands and put her in the bathtub. Later, at Smith's request, Nichols allowed her to hop from the bathroom into the bedroom, where she began talking to him.

In short order, Smith was reading aloud to Nichols from the Christian book "The Purpose-Driven Life" – in direct violation of his constitutional right to never hear any reference to God, in public or private, for any purpose, ever, ever, ever! For more on this right, go to the "People for the American Way" website.

After reading the first paragraph of Chapter 33 aloud, about serving God by serving others, Nichols – the man pundits were calling an "animal" – asked her to read it again.

Nichols listened to the passage again and responded by telling Smith he was already dead, saying, "Look at my eyes." But Smith looked and told him God had a purpose for him, perhaps to minister to other lost souls in prison. Smith read to Nichols some more, both from the "Purpose" book and from another popular book that's been dropped from all news accounts of this incident: the New Testament. (In the Hollywood version, Smith will be reading from the Quran.)

Smith knew all about Nichols' violent depredations from television. Yet she saw him not as a monster, but as one of God's creatures. Most Christians – most people – have trouble seeing the humanity of people who take our parking spots. Smith could see God's hand in a multiple murderer holding her hostage. By showing him genuine Christian love, Smith turned Nichols from a beast to a brother in Christ. This phenomenon, utterly unknown to liberals, is what's known as a "miracle." Top that, Paul Krugman!

Nichols told Smith she was "an angel sent from God," calling her "his sister" and himself her "brother in Christ." Nichols said he had come to Smith's home for a reason, in Smith's words, that "he was lost and God led him right to me to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people."

This trampling of our Constitution – I mean this conversation – lasted long into the night. They watched Nichols' shooting people on television. Nichols said he couldn't believe he was that man. In the morning, Smith made Nichols eggs and pancakes for breakfast. Then she walked out of the apartment to pick up her daughter and to call 911. The last thing Nichols said as Smith was leaving was to say hello to her daughter for him. When the police arrived, Nichols surrendered without incident, an utterly transformed human being.

Heaven help the average liberal if this ever happens to him! What would an urban secularist do? Come sit down and let me read to you from Michael Moore's "Stupid White Men." Or maybe he could put a SpongeBob video in the VCR. WE ARE FAM-I-LEEEEE! At least before he killed again, the dangerous fugitive would have warm feelings toward homosexuals.

It's also another example of how our universities are failing students. Today's college coeds would be dead: They know nothing about Jesus Christ and can't cook a good meal.

Smith saved the soul of a man on a killing spree by talking to him about Christianity. But liberals think this won't work with the Muslims? We ought to fly this Ashley Smith to Saudi Arabia. We could just make her a box lunch every day and send her on her way.
Liberals would approve of a nice Christian girl like Smith going to the Middle East only if she went as a Marine or – better! – if she were getting herself run over by a tank while defending a PLO tunnel into the Gaza Strip used by suicide bombers. Sadly for liberals, feminist lunacy doesn't convert and transform, it browbeats and harangues. The only miracle it has ever performed is getting people to listen to Nancy Pelosi.

Ann Coulter is host of AnnCoulter.org, a Townhall.com member group.

[editor]

Coulter rocks!

[Oscar]

Folks,

Here is an appropriate article for this thread.  I cut it out of an e-mail forum I belong to that does not allow linking, so I don't know the "address" of the article.

BTW, Thomas Sowell is a professor of economics and a political columnist.

                                                **********************                                                                                                               
October 25, 2005
"Us" or "Them"
By Thomas Sowell

A reader recently sent me an e-mail about a woman he had met and fallen for. Apparently the attraction was mutual -- until one fateful day the subject of the environment came up.

She was absolutely opposed to any drilling for oil in Alaska, on grounds of what harm she said it would do to the environment.

He argued that, since oil was going to be drilled for somewhere in the world anyway, was it not better to drill where there were environmental laws to provide at least some kinds of safeguards, rather than in countries where there were none?

That was the end of a beautiful relationship.

Environmentalist true believers don't think in terms of trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis. There are things that are sacred to them. Trying to get them to compromise on those things would be like trying to convince a Moslem to eat pork, if it was only twice a week.

Compromise and tolerance are not the hallmarks of true believers. What they believe in goes to the heart of what they are. As far as true believers are concerned, you are either one of Us or one of Them.

The man apparently thought that it was just a question of which policy would produce which results. But many issues that look on the surface like they are just about which alternative would best serve the general public are really about being one of Us or one of Them -- and this woman was not about to become one of Them.

Many crusades of the political left have been misunderstood by people who do not understand that these crusades are about establishing the identity and the superiority of the crusaders.

T.S. Eliot understood this more than half a century ago when he wrote: "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

In this case, the man thought he was asking the woman to accept a certain policy as the lesser of two evils, when in fact he was asking her to give up her sense of being one of the morally anointed.

This is not unique to our times or to environmentalists. Back during the 1930s, in the years leading up to World War II, one of the fashionable self-indulgences of the left in Britain was to argue that the British should disarm "as an example to others" in order to serve the interests of peace.

When economist Roy Harrod asked one of his friends whether she thought that disarming Britain would cause Hitler to disarm, her reply was: "Oh, Roy, have you lost all your idealism?"

In other words, it was not really about which policy would produce what results. It was about personal identification with lofty goals and kindred souls.

The ostensible goal of peace was window-dressing. Ultimately it was not a question whether arming or disarming Britain was more likely to deter Hitler. It was a question of which policy would best establish the moral superiority of the anointed and solidify their identification with one another.

"Peace" movements are not judged by the empirical test of how often they actually produce peace or how often their disarmament tempts an aggressor into war. It is not an empirical question. It is an article of faith and a badge of identity.

Yasser Arafat was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace -- not for actually producing peace but for being part of what was called "the peace process," based on fashionable notions that were common bonds among members of what are called "peace movements."

Meanwhile, nobody suggested awarding a Nobel Prize for peace to Ronald Reagan, just because he brought the nuclear dangers of a decades-long cold war to an end. He did it the opposite way from how members of "peace movements" thought it should be done.

Reagan beefed up the military and entered into an "arms race" that he knew would bankrupt the Soviet Union if they didn't back off, even though arms races are anathema to members of "peace movements." The fact that events proved him right was no excuse as far as members of "peace movements" were concerned. As far as they were concerned, he was not one of Us. He was one of Them.

     **************************************************************************************************

I think we can see how this relates to political/religious/philosophical debates as well.

Thomas Maddux

[outdeep]

"Us" vs. "Them" is at http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/10/25/172897.html.

-Dave

[al Hartman]

I just received this in an e-mail.  This thread seems an appropriate place to post it:

The Little Red Hen, Modern Version


Once upon a time, on a farm in Texas , there was a little red hen
     who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered quite a few
     grains of wheat.

     She called all of her neighbors together and said, "If we plant this
     wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?"

     "Not I," said the cow.

     "Not I," said the duck.

     "Not I," said the pig.

     "Not I," said the goose.

     "Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen. And so she did.

The wheat grew very tall and ripened into golden grain.

     "Who will help me reap my wheat?" asked the little red hen.

     "Not I," said the duck.

     "Out of my classification," said the pig.

     "I'd lose my seniority," said the cow.

     "I'd lose my unemployment compensation," said the goose.

     "Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen, and so she did.

At last it came time to bake the bread.

     "Who will help me bake the bread! ?" asked the little red hen.

     "That would be overtime for me," said the cow.

     "I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck.

     "I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig.

     "If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the goose.

     "Then I will do it by myself," said the little red hen.

She baked five loaves and held them up for all of her neighbors to see. They
     wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen
     said, "No, I shall eat all five loaves."

     "Excess profits!" cried the cow.

     "Capitalist leech!" screamed the duck.

     "I demand equal rights!" yelled the goose.

     The pig just grunted in disdain.

     And they all painted "Unfair!" picket signs and marched around and
     around the little red hen, shouting obscenities.

Then a government agent came, he said to the little red hen, "You
     must not be so greedy."

     "But I earned the bread," said the little red hen.

    "Exactly," said the agent. "That is what makes our free enterprise
     system so wonderful. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as
     he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the
     productive workers must divide the fruits of their labor with those
     who are lazy and idle,"

     And they all lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who
     smiled and clucked, "I am grateful, for now I truly understand,"

     But her neighbors became quite disappointed in her. She never again
     baked bread because she joined the "party" and got her bread free.

And all the Democrats smiled. 'Fairness' had been established.
     Individual initiative had died, but nobody noticed; perhaps no one
     cared.....as long as there was free bread that "the rich" were 
     paying for.

     Bill Clinton is getting $12 million for his memoirs.

     Hillary got $8 million for hers.

     That's $20 million for memories from two people, who for eight years,
     repeatedly testified, under oath, that they couldn't remember anything.

     IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT?