In her book, The Guns of August, historian Barbara Tuchman, told the story of how, seemingly against its collective will, Europe moved inexorably toward World War 1. At one point, she recounted a conversation between an ex-chancellor of Germany and his successor. “How did it all happen?” the first man asked incredulously. “Ach,” said his successor, “if we only knew.” One can’t help but wonder if, come January 20, 2009, Democrats won’t be engaging in...

Happily, there will be no debate between Senators Clinton and Obama in North Carolina. Their twenty-one previous confrontations have, above all, proven the vacuity of the debate form as developed in the television age. We either need to get rid of debates altogether or radically change them. (In addition to reducing their number dramatically.) I would suggest the following format for future head-to-head confrontations between two candidates: First, get rid of anchors, moderators, or interlocutors...

The presidential election was held in Zimbabwe more than three weeks ago. While it’s widely rumored that strongman Robert Mugabe was ousted by voters, we don’t know for sure. That’s because his government has refused to reveal the results. Mugabe apparently intends to cling to power, continuing to exercise his reign of terror (and error), thuggishly intimidating opposition, and killing off the Zimbabwean economy, while claiming that all the bad stuff in his country is Britain’s...

Scorn has been heaped on ABC News anchors Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for their work on this week’s debate between Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama, his supporters, and some pundits have been critical of the two for using more than half of the debate to pose what they regard as “gotcha” questions, rather than ones dealing with substantive issues. Stephanopoulos defended the approach taken by he and Gibson, saying, “We...

[UPDATE, CLARIFICATION: If the comments of GS below, are any indication, my meaning in this piece may be less than clear. So, a little disclaimer, as it appears in my response below: "We have a health insurance crisis in our country. It must be dealt with. it is a scandal that in a land of plenty, with the best health care professionals and technology in the world, anyone should suffer unnecessarily or not have access to health care. I never said anything to contradict that in this piece! "I was...

An eighty-six year old man told me on Sunday, “There has got to be a better way to pick a president than what we’ve got now.” He added, “It’s pitiful!” I think he’s right. Sean Oxendine is appalled by the Democratic nomination process, which he reports that one of his friends calls, “like the electoral college, but more random.” But, Oxendine says, the most disturbing element of this “process” is the impact of the order in which primaries...

Back in February, 2005, while guest blogging on MSNBC, Ann Althouse speculated about Condoleezza Rice as a candidate for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Those old enough to remember all the way back to 2005, may recall that there was something of a Rice boomlet at the time. As the early months of that year wore on, the newly-installed Secretary of State felt compelled to respond to questions about the possibility that she would be a candidate. Her schedule was scrutinized for events deemed...

Continuing, on my personal blog, to analyze some of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s public communiques from the standpoint of one Christian pastor, I found myself, as I wrote the third installment last evening, considering the super-heated discussions we have as the result of new media: For now at least, the mainstream media and the blogging world have, for the most part, left the Jeremiah Wright controversy behind. That’s too bad in a way and it showcases the problem with what has become not...

Heretofore unrevealed antisemitic and racist comments from former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright received prominent play on Thursday night. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, convincing me that tonight, I needed to react and analyze Wright’s various pronouncements from one Christian’s perspective: [Antisemitic] talk like this has no place in Christian discourse. In the most famous passage in the New Testament, Jesus told Nicodemus that God so “love the world,”...

It looks like I’m not the only one. The way I see it, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton cannot win the nomination and is unelectable…too many negatives…and Barack Obama has been rendered equally toxic by the Jeremiah Wright debacle. But those uncommitted superdelegates just might save the day for Dems, after all. Here’s how: The superdelegates could remain uncommitted through the first ballot of the convention. Neither Obama or Clinton would then have enough votes to...

I’ve written before about my long-ago acquaintance with Sherrod Brown, Ohio’s junior US Senator. Brown was a very young member of the Ohio House of Representatives when, in 1979, I spent a year as Supervisor of Pages. He was always personable and without pretense, in spite of having won election to the House at a very young age and his obvious intelligence, two things that could have made one so young a bit full of himself. Yesterday, after not running into Brown in twenty-eight years,...

The Columbus Dispatch is today reporting on John Kasich’s preparations for a 2010 for the GOP nomination in the Ohio gubernatorial race. No surprises there. If Kasich, former Senator Mike DeWine, and former Congressman (and Bush functionary) Rob Portman all seek the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2010, it will be an interesting, well-funded race. At this point, one can legitimately wonder whether it’ll be a race worth making. Democratic governor Ted Strickland enjoys high approval...

Liberal Democratic blogger Deborah White delivers a scathing denunciation of Hillary Clinton, saying that it’s time that the New York Senator withdraws from the presidential race: How could anyone seriously believe that, after the brutal and dishonest behavior of the Clintons since Super Tuesday, February 5th, that the American people, exhausted by the brutal and dishonest Bush administration, would lift Hillary and Bill Clinton up to electoral victory and return them to four more years in...

The speaker was British actor Paul Scofield, who died today. He posed the question in response to queries as to why he didn’t want to be knighted, gaining the privilege of being called, “Sir.” In spite of being in a very public profession, Scofield felt no need to be a public personality, a celebrity. Scofield’s decision for ordinariness, in spite of his extraordinary talent, is a bit damning, however unintentionally, of those marginally talented celebrities with which the...

Nearly twenty years ago, then-Ohio Governor Dick Celeste went to Iowa, exploring the possibility of making a run for the Democratic presidential nomination. One of Celeste’s hosts while there was a transplanted Ohioan, a Methodist pastor. During that stay, a wire reporter asked Celeste about reports that he’d stepped out on his wife. The pastor-host told the reporter that if he were Celeste, he’d simply say, “It’s none of your business.” I thought of that advice...

The Plain Dealer has a great obituary.

It’s been the subject of speculation for weeks. Some pundits call it “the dream team.” Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been asked about it. And Bill Clinton pushed one version of it while stumping for his wife this week. So, how likely is it that once one of them has the Democratic nomination for president, that Obama or Clinton will ask the other to become their running mate? There is a particular sense to it. Such marriages of convenience between the numbers two main...

Logan, county seat of Hocking County, Ohio, the rural wonderland that sits about fifty-minutes southeast of Columbus, wasn’t as hard-hit as the capital city has been by the snow storm of the past twenty-four hours. But we’ve been under a Level 3 alert, meaning that only emergency vehicles could be on the roads. In Columbus, over 20-inches of snow fell. Here, we got about half that. I spoke with my dad, who lives in Columbus, little more than an hour ago, and he says that, at this point,...

We’re snowed in here in southeastern Ohio. So, after I finished working on my sermon for tomorrow, we sat down to watch Amazing Grace. Have you seen it? It’s the second time for me. It tells the story of British politician William Wilberforce and his decades-long fight for two main life goals: the end of the slave trade in Britain and the reform of society. Three days before Wilberforce died, after years of struggle and personal pain, slavery was banished from the entire British Empire....

Ohio Senator George Voinovich has long been known as a deficit hawk. Whether as Commissioner of Cuyahoga County, Mayor of Cleveland, or Governor of Ohio, Voinovich has a strong reputation for insisting that government ought to live within its means. In recent years, that’s made him out-of-step with Republicans in Congress and the White House who have departed from traditional conservative Republican principles to engage in “drunken sailor” spending (to borrow a phrase from a Republican...

I wrote here last night about my perception that John McCain’s campaign as the presidential nominee of the Republican party was starting off on the wrong foot. Emblematic of that to me was McCain’s decision to tear to Washington to receive a personal endorsement from George W. Bush today. Mind you, I would expect nothing other than the sitting Republican president to

Throughout this presidential campaign, two words have been almost universally left unsaid by the Republican candidates for president. Two words have been avoided as though they were poison. What are those two words? George Bush. Even Mitt Romney, who on occasion stoutly defended the President when trying to woo Bush voters, was loathe to defend Mr. Bush when asked about the current president’s record during the Republicans’ most recent debate at the Reagan presidential library. The reason...

and other stuff, as discussed when Rick Moore interviewed me on his Internet radio show on Monday night. Go here to listen to this scintillating radio. Here are links to posts mentioned during the interview: Tears in New Hampshire Fearless Predictions How Christians Might Think About the 2008 Presidential Election As Ohio Goes See here and here on public school funding

Here in Logan, Ohio, where I’ve served as pastor of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church for four months, concerns about the economy run high. That’s because this town of 6000, nestled in the beautiful Hocking Hills and county seat Hocking County, has been hard hit by a number of plant closings over the past decade. People who once worked decent-paying factory jobs are, in many cases, unemployed or underemployed. A small contingent of the county’s population are transplants or college-educated...

Conservative blogger Rick Moore has asked me to appear on his Internet radio show, Holy Coast on the Air this coming Monday night. I’ll be discussing the upcoming Ohio primary with him, as well as my 2007 blog series on how Christians might think about the 2008 presidential election. (Note: I don’t believe that God is a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative.) The whole thing happens at 10:00pm Eastern, 7:00pm Pacific. If you go to the link, here, you’ll be able to...