December 20, 2012

Column: The Resurrection

At the very core of Christianity is the historical authenticity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. But for His resurrection, we would not be celebrating His birth.

The Apostle Paul said, "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain."

Christian apologist Josh McDowell spent more than 700 hours studying the subject of the resurrection and concluded that it "is one of the most wicked, vicious, heartless hoaxes ever foisted upon the minds of men, or it is the most amazing fact of history." When a university student asked him why he was unable to refute Christianity, McDowell responded, "For a very simple reason: I am not able to explain away an event in history -- the resurrection of Jesus Christ."

The Old Testament prophets and Jesus predicted the resurrection. The resurrection was central to Christ's preaching. He said, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?"

Well, do you?

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:01 PM | Printer Friendly

December 17, 2012

Column: God Suffers With Us

I can't imagine anything more painful for a person than the loss of one's child, and so I won't pretend that I can adequately express the horror of the savage murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

When such tragedies occur, most of us engage in sober reflection about the preciousness of life and especially of our own loved ones. As much as we hurt for the families who lost children at the hands of this murderer, we thank God our children are safe.

But we know it can happen to any parent; these victims did absolutely nothing to provoke this wanton act of evil.

How could an all-powerful, all-loving God permit such horrors to occur? Indeed, isn't the prevalence of evil in the world a major reason so many people through the years have rejected the notion of a personal God altogether? Isn't it why St. Augustine flirted with Manichaeism and its idea of the duality of good and evil? Isn't it why a few of our founding fathers latched on to belief in a deistic god who created the universe and human beings but then abandoned them to fend for themselves without any further intervention in history? Manichaeism, Deism and even Eastern religions don't seem to present as severe a conundrum concerning the problem of evil.

Without question, apparent intellectual obstacles sometimes mask the greater root causes of our doubt, chiefly human pride and human sin, but I am convinced that intellectual doubts about evil and suffering are a genuine impediment to faith for some.

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:19 PM | Printer Friendly

December 13, 2012

Column: Republicans Do Have Leverage; Use It!

At this stage of the fiscal cliff pseudo negotiations, do the American people have any idea what the Republicans stand for other than to protect the wealthy and cut Medicare and Social Security to harm the sick and aged?

People constantly invoke Ronald Reagan, but one thing is certain and very relevant: If Reagan were on the national stage today, the public would not be confused about what the Republican Party stands for and why it matters.

The GOP is having difficulty even consolidating around a central message, much less selling it to the public. There is no excuse for that.

Though following its election defeat the party has all the confidence of an abandoned stepchild, it needs to shake the dust off, stand up and begin fighting like it truly believes the nation is worth fighting for.

It is automatically assumed in virtually all corners that President Obama has all the leverage in these budget talks. But is that necessarily true?

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:38 PM | Printer Friendly

Column: Conservative Media Are Not the Problem

It is really getting old to hear liberal politicians and pundits complaining about conservative media as being destructive, as if the country would be better off returning to the halcyon days of the monolithic liberal media.

That seems to be the view of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who complained about "the right-wing control of the American media, particularly starting with Fox News." During a discussion on HuffPost Live, Kennedy said, "Ninety-five percent of talk radio in our country is right-wing ... so a whole section of our country that's what they're hearing."

"Twenty-two percent of Americans," continued Kennedy, "say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and it's empowered these large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United States Congress elected -- the tea party ideologues who control the Republican Party."

Admittedly, many conservatives complain about the liberal media, but that's because they hold themselves out as unbiased journalists when their reporting is flagrantly slanted in favor of Democrats.

Their bias is obvious in their selection of news stories, in their presentation of those stories, and in the contrasting treatment they accord politicians and policies of the respective political parties.

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:36 PM | Printer Friendly

Column: It's Time To Turn the Tables on this Presidential Bully

Something is very wrong in the world when the most dogmatic and inflexible president in recent memory can make unreasonable demands of his GOP budget opponents and yet be confident they'll be blamed for the impasse.

It is past time Barack Obama be held accountable for his intentionally irresponsible fiscal policies that are guaranteed to take us into national bankruptcy. It is outrageous enough that he is steering us into insolvency, but it is unbearable that he's fraudulently blaming the Republican Party for it to boot.

This is not a close call, and reasonable people, if they understood the facts, would not support Obama. The problem is that so many people who trust him, inexplicably, look no further than his disingenuous statements and the liberal media's slanted reporting, and the Republican Party leadership simply cannot seem to get its message across. It would help if they evidenced more faith in the wisdom of their own approach.

This isn't complicated. Our financial problems are overwhelmingly a result of excess spending, not of insufficient tax revenues. Increasing rates or decreasing deductions won't make a speck of difference, and Obama knows it.

Our $16 trillion national debt and our $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities are going to destroy this nation in relatively short order if we don't take drastic remedial action.

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:34 PM | Printer Friendly

December 03, 2012

New Column: Obama Barreling Toward Real Fiscal Cliff

Some commentators wonder why President Obama always engages in brinksmanship. Why can't he meet Republicans halfway, like Clinton did, they ask. Let me try to respond.

One blogger suggests that Obama prefers to play chicken, taking the nation right to the edge of a fiscal disaster because it will increase the likelihood that the GOP will cave. Perhaps, but there's more to it.

Many of us warned that Obama is not, by nature or ideology, a conciliator. He is not a centrist, and he's not someone who is interested in the other side's ideas. He knows what he wants to do, and he is hell-bent on doing it. He is not just playing hardball as a matter of strategy; he has no interest in compromise and is angling to get his way entirely. And he wants to further damage the Republican brand in the process.

The way Obama probably looks at it is that Republicans will cave and he will either get most of what he wants, or the Republicans will hold fast and he can effectively blame them for taking us over the fiscal cliff. You'll note that in none of these explanations is there a hint that Obama is motivated to do what is best for the country. He intends to act in his own best interests and those of his party, and decidedly against the interests of the GOP and, ultimately, the nation.

To better understand what we're dealing with and what the stakes are in these negotiations, let's take a look at what people mean when they say we're headed toward a fiscal cliff in January -- as distinguished from the much bigger cliff we're heading for if we don't get our deficits and debt under control very soon.

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 08:11 PM | Printer Friendly

November 29, 2012

New Column: Time for Congressional Republicans To Expose Obama's Agenda

We can get back to discussing GOP minority constituent recruitment soon, but in the meantime, we have a fiscal cliff issue that beckons -- the real fiscal cliff (America's imminent financial collapse), not the government shutdown molehill everyone is agonizing over.

Congressional Republicans should look at their party's loss in the presidential election as liberating. They surely now understand that the strategy of soft-pedaling Obama's record and agenda doesn't work. They surely grasp that its fear of calling President Obama out on his real intentions and the disastrous consequences of his destructive policies just plays into his hands and enables the advancement of his agenda.

So, how about some bold, straight language from our side? How about telling the American people exactly what Obama is up to? How about drawing a line in the sand right now -- before the pseudo "fiscal cliff" negotiations even begin -- and announcing there is no point to entering these farcical talks because they don't share the same goals? Republicans want to prevent a national financial collapse, and Obama wants to keep spending and prevent entitlement reform so that he can complete his task of fundamentally transforming America.

Obama is already engaging in doublespeak and deception about his goals in these negotiations, and Republicans, instead of permitting him to control the language and the narrative, should flush his true intentions into the open at the very outset.

Let's start with this fact: Obama doesn't want to raise "revenues." He wants to raise tax rates on the "wealthy," a group that includes tons of people who are not wealthy, and a policy that may well not raise significant revenues anyway. Even if you assume tax hikes on those who provide the lion's share of American jobs won't further suppress economic growth and thus revenues, the amount of money they would generate won't make a dent in our annual deficits, much less our crushing national debt.

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 07:02 PM | Printer Friendly

November 26, 2012

New Column: Social Conservatives: GOP Can't Live Without Them

One of the largest elephants in the GOP's post-election room is the fate of Christian and other social conservatives. Party honchos can't just wish this problem away -- or, maybe they can.

There has been increasing hostility toward Christian involvement in politics, and the animus hasn't been solely from the left. To be sure, Democrats have taken the lead, demonizing conservative Christians as science-challenged scolds who don't care about women's "reproductive rights," but there is plenty of antipathy from certain elements within the Republican Party, as well.

Many establishment and some libertarian Republicans have long looked upon Christian conservatives with mild, condescending contempt. Party leaders from Barry Goldwater to Alan Simpson have openly derided Christians and lamented their negative influence on the party and on the overall political climate.

Even Ronald Reagan's warm embrace of faith-based conservatives didn't diminish the establishment's disdain for them, which forcibly reared its head over the Todd Akin and Rick Mourdock kerfuffles. So swift and dramatic was their descent on Akin following his "forcible rape" embarrassment that one could almost infer they were lying in wait for just such an excuse to marginalize outspoken Christian conservatives.

Don't get me wrong; I had serious doubts about Akin's electability after the comments, too, but the establishment's outrage wasn't limited to Akin (or Mourdock) or even to his rape comment. There was palpable disgust from certain quarters on the right over what they perceived as the lunacy of making social issues a part of the equation at all.

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Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:15 PM | Printer Friendly