A critical election

Both the DNC and GOP conventions are history.  After a few days (hours?) of post mortems the candidates will be hitting the campaign trail for the last sixty days of what seems an interminably long, painful process.  Painful because of all the lies and distortions oneness to wade through to decide who has the best path forward for the country. It should be clear to just about everyone that Obama's policies over the past four years have not worked, in fact, cannot work.  One would expect him to offer a different set of policies for the next four years.  Surprisingly in his convention speech he chose instead to simply ask for more time for his policies to finish the job.  Since most of his policies are have been tried in Europe and in outright socialist countries over and over and have always failed, it does seem a bit cheeky for him to ask the citizens for more time to prove he's right.  However, since the welfare state policies and programs of the past 75 years have created a huge constituency of dependents, and given that the Democrat Party has more or less perfected the ability to promote and pander to these voters, he stands a pretty good chance of reelection.  His election will take the country further along the road to socialism and the inevitable ruin that social order produces.  Romney's election, on the other hand,  providing he makes good on the reforms needed to get us back to a more honest, free enterprise capitalism, should provide the course correction desperately needed.  Four more years of Obama and his crown should just about be the right amount of time to turn our economy into the basket case economies we now see in Europe.  This is an important election.

Protestantism's weak link

For many years now mainstream Protestant sects, e.g., Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, et al, have been losing communicants while Evangelical sects have been growing. There are no doubt many and complicated reasons for this development;  however,  at least one obvious explanation lies in thinking of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who as the head of the Church of England putatively speaks as the religious voice of the state of England and its worldwide offshoot, the Episcopal Church.  Williams embodies the secular and politically correct "social justice" philosophy reflected in the leftist politics of Barak Obama and his minions.  Briefly this philosophy is anti the values embodied in the American Constitutional, anti the concept of American exceptionalism,  anti-Western values in general, specifically Capitalism's embrace of the importance of self interest, private property rights, competition, and all the rest that goes with an economic system that has raised millions of people out of poverty over the last two hundred years.  Communitarians like Williams and Obama want  an economic system that produces equal outcomes and a society in which all group political and religious rights and values are accepted and respected equally.  The only real difference between the Obama-Williams and communist philosophies is the acceptance of a role by religion by the former.  Of course those religions must embrace the relativism and social justice values inherent in communism to be acceptable. Clearly the protestantism of shared values with Capitalism, to wit: the importance and significance of the individual person and the attendant values of  hard work, self discipline, competitive spirit, individual good works, and the like, has given way in the Obama-Williams world to a group rights, non competitive cooperative feel good, equality above all else, Protestantism.  Roger Kimball provides some interesting insights into the thinking of Rowan Williams here.