The American Spectator

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Waiting for Obama

4.7.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 3 of 6)

Do we want to come together in a true melting pot
Where only character counts? Of course. Why not?

But we the people are awake and aware.
We recognize false prophets, so have a care!
-- Mimi Evans Winship

RED BAIT
Re: William Schulz's Had They No Sense of Decency?:

Not the mendacious media and not popular culture. Thank God.

I am reading Blacklisted by History now. It's slow going because it is so well written, so meticulously researched and so dense with facts that the reader who doesn't savor every word is short-changing him or herself. Mr. Evans's masterpiece should be required reading in any course focusing on Modern American Political History (heh, yeah, right, maybe in 50 more years). In an case, I will finish it (this year, I hope) and I will be the better for having done it since I will know that which I knew not before.

As I remember the passages detailing the documents Mr. Evans expected to find but didn't, my prayer is that a future M. Stanton Evans will be able to piece together the circumstances surrounding yet other abuses of the trust and confidence mistakenly placed by the American people in a President/Co-President, National Security Advisor, and most of an entire administration.
-- John Jarrell
San Antonio, Texas

In recent years, I kept noticing I'd been had by oh-so-many stories that, I came to realize, had been put out by the left, that were out-and-out wrong. I'm not surprised to find I'd been had by what was said about Joe McCarthy.

I did have one beef with M. Stanton Evans's book. It's been so long since it all happened, and so much has happened since, that for the kind-of younger crowd like me who didn't live through it, it's hard to figure out just who's who in the book. One subject is identified as a "professor," but the name given is that of a famous astronomer...I was not sure they were one and the same (the name is as odd as my own), and going over the text carefully left me wondering if I had missed something.
-- Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida

CHUCK'S INQUISITION
Re: Bob Emrich's Snake in the Grassley:

My thanks to Rev. Bob Emrich for his article. Rev. Emrich expresses genuine Christian concern about the Senate Finance Committee's letter to and apparent interest in the wealth of Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, and three other so-called "Christian ministers." I too dislike any precedent that bolsters the humanistic, secularist god-State in man's rebellion against the true Ruler of this world, our Lord Jesus Christ, and against His true Church.

But that's not what we see here. The incident of the Grassley letter represents a very opposite situation. A genuine, orthodox Christian layman in the U.S. Senate appropriately exercises his civil power and duty to inquire about the tax-evading, self-enriching proclivities of a bunch of unregenerate phonies.

Senator Grassley and my Dad used to work in the same Cedar Falls, Iowa machine shop together, back fifty years ago when our Senior Senator first sought election to the Iowa House of Representatives. I cast my first general election vote in 1980 at age 18, a straight-Republican absentee ballot from my temporary abode at Christian college. My vote went to, among other men, then-Congressman Charles Grassley bravely challenging a sitting Democrat Senator. I have voted for Senator Grassley ever since and expect to continue to do so. Politically speaking, I think I know him pretty well. I do occasionally disagree with some initiatives of his (farm subsidies, earmarks). But I never, ever doubt Senator Grassley's good intentions and general good sense.

Nor do I doubt his commitment to Jesus Christ and His true Church. Charles E. Grassley and his wife Barbara are life-long members of the Conservative Baptist Church in Cedar Falls. The CBC is as middle-of-the-road "evangelical" conservative Protestant as one gets, these days. The adjective 'evangelical' has come a good distance since its rise in common use during the Protestant Reformation. But then and down to the present day the term generally signifies a Christian who freely preaches the "Evangel," the Good News: that any man, dead in sin, may receive new life through sovereign grace of God, Who forgives and pardons the man's sins, through the blood of His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, resurrected from the dead.

Rev. Emrich -- identifying himself as a "Bible Baptist" church pastor -- astonished me when he employed the term "evangelical churches" to describe the likes of Kenneth Copeland Ministries. For many years most orthodox "evangelical" Protestants I know would name the six targets of Charles Grassley's letter as any of (in descending order into Hell): 1) heterodox (at very best), 2) outright heretical, and/or 3) ungodly fraudsters. All of them, Copeland and Dollar in particular, preach and live (very well!) by a completely materialistic, sub-Christian pseudo-theology. Main-stream evangelical Christians identify their propaganda as "Prosperity Gospel" or "Name it and claim it Christianity" -- and we call it false teaching. In so many words, Copeland, Hinn, Dollar and their ilk tell credulous people that "God wants you to get rich!" And they'll get rich if they "Send money to my ministry!" Guess who profits...

Duh. Easy roads to success -- how humanist and un-Christian can you get?

Letter to the Editor

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