Showing posts with label Saddleback Forum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saddleback Forum. Show all posts

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Saddleback Forum

I wasn't going to post on this subject but one thing that came out of it sticks in my craw and I'll feel better getting it out of my system.

I watched bits and pieces of it. I was not comfortable that one specific religious movement, the Evangelicals, were allowed such a forum. It is perilously close to violating the precept I have of division of church and state. In a country that prides itself on "freedom" of religion, this appears as a special dispensation for one group to put forth a litmus test.

That aside, I found the questions to be far less hard hitting than the hype suggested they would be. Each candidate answered as they have been campaigning. In the wrap up, talking heads accused Obama of being "nuanced". I took it as thoughtful.

McCain relied on his status as a prisoner of war and spoke in the generalities his audience wanted to hear. I found little value in any of it. Except when, as he has before, John McCain gave his stump speech promise that he will follow Bin Laden to "the gates of hell" to bring him to justice and that he knows how to do it.

If this is so, the "I know how to do it" bit, has he not an obligation to share such insight with the current administration and the rest of the world? I think, of course, it's more of his war hero and commander in chief rhetoric. If it's not just a boast, and he knows something others do not it is a betrayal of the American people.

Which ever it is, it is ill conceived.