Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Prophet without honor

Peter Wehner dismantles a Jim Wallis screed. The two most biting paragraphs:

There is an immense double standard that exists in American life, and especially in the American media. The “Religious Right” is often accused — and sometimes fairly accused — of being intemperate, uncivil, staggeringly simplistic, and uninformed when they speak out on matters of public policy. Yet this is precisely what Jim Wallis — whose rantings will garner far less attention than those of Pat Robertson or, when he was alive, Jerry Falwell — is doing. Wallis’s words could easily emerge from the fever swamps of the Left.

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For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Jim Wallis is lying in writing what he did. I simply believe he is deeply uninformed and politically tendentious, animated, and blinded by his political biases. And while he claims to be public theologian and a prophet, he’s a good deal closer to being a James Carville or a Paul Begala — though at least the latter don’t pretend to be “prophets” who are hovering above politics in a disinterested and morally serious fashion. Nor do they wrap their screeds in the garb of religious faith, pretending to be agents of reconciliation and civility when in fact they are simply undermining any possible claim to moral or intellectual seriousness.

Read the whole thing, especially if you want to see a former White House aide concede our intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war and you want to review some of the best evidence for why Iraq was nonetheless dangerous.

I wish there had been more intelligence skeptics in the White House in 2003, but I also appreciate the burdens of political judgment in a very dangerous world.

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