Obama's Birth Certificate

President Obama released his Birth Certificate after two and a half years of people asking whether or not he was constitutionally eligible to actually be President of the United States. The question in most people’s minds is (including Oprah Winfrey in a taping she held for an upcoming show): “What took you so long?”

For the most part, that particular drama is now over. I was never really that concerned about it because if Obama was kicked out of the Oval Office, the next one to fill that spot would be Joe Biden. It gives me chills (and not the good ones that run “up and down you leg”) to think of that scenario.

But it brings up another drama; the continuing saga of a whether or not we should have an African American man in the White house. I for one have never had a problem with our President being African American (is it still politically incorrect to say he’s “black”). I have a problem with this particular African American being our President. But it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s an African American. It has more to do with the fact that he’s inept and unqualified for the job. No amount of on-the-job training is going to fix this problem. The man seems incapable of learning even the basic tenets of economics or leadership, both which have been completely absent since January 20, 2009.

Peniel Joseph stated that the problem with the “birthers”, as they are called, is that they suffer from “a deep seated and vicious racism” which is fundamentally connected to a white supremacism in this country”. Peniel Joseph is a history professor at Tufts University. Apparently, Mr. Joseph missed the memo that we live in a “post racial” society now that the greatest country that ever existed has elected an African American to be its President.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. said, “So it is time to call this birther nonsense what it is --- not just claptrap, but profoundly racist claptrap”. When tens of millions of people who live in this country are concerned because their elected leader will not provide a simple document proving that I had to provide in order to simply get a Maryland Driver’s License, this is not claptrap, much less “profoundly racist” claptrap. Obama has a problem with credibility. Not too many people believe him anymore. It’s like that old joke that you can tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving. Here’s a clue: not everything is about race.

If the people at the Miami Herald, including you, Mr. Pitts, had done their job in the first place in 2007 instead of acting like infatuated schoolgirls hoping Barry would look your way, most of this “claptrap” would not have happened. The mainstream news outlets, both the print as well as broadcast news, asked tough questions of the conservative candidates and tossed softballs at Barack Obama. One candidate was vilified because the speaker who opened the night for his candidate dared to use Obama’s full name: Barack Hussein Obama. John McCain actually was called racist because of this apparent faux pas (And to think we conservatives are called hateful and intolerant).

And of course, we can’t omit the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has made a career of calling white people racists. He told the Politico that Donald Trump’s campaign to get Obama to release his birth certificate was deeply rooted in race. “Any discussion of [Obama’s] birthplace is a code word… It calls upon ancient racial fears.” Jesse Jackson is an enigma in and of himself. He’s a reverend who has never been the pastor of a church and a politician who has never held an elected office. He did march with Dr. Martin Luther King, though. I really think that Dr. King, if he were alive today, would be distancing himself from Jesse Jackson and others like him because with Jesse Jackson, it’s all about the color of skin rather than the content of character. They lack any content of character at all. The only reason people like him continue to bring up race is that without the “race card”, they have no authority and no following. Without racial tension, the Jesse Jackson and Al Sharptons of this world don’t really have a place to go, no purpose for being here and no platform from which to speak.

I’m not saying that racism does not exist. Unfortunately, it does. In its ugliest form, it has caused untold harm to millions of innocent people worldwide. We all identify with people who look like we do, hold our own same core beliefs, and have similar tastes as we do. Heavy metal rock fans don’t hang out with the Euro-Techno beat crowd, the Country Western industry or the hip-hop crowd. Personally, outside of my immediate family, I don’t have many friends that are liberal in their politics or who vote the Democrat ticket. But that is not racism. That's called preference.

To some degree, we all have a bit of racial preference in us to the extent that we all feel most comfortable with people of our own culture, people of our own nationality, people who look like we do, talk like we do, think like we do and act like we do. This is how we were all wired from birth. My first dog did not like people dressed in coveralls, like workmen used to wear in the early 60’s. She had a bad experience with someone in coveralls and from that day forth, she would growl at anyone wearing coveralls, even my dad. My first wife’s dog did not like people in uniform. Right after we married, I joined the Army National Guard and came home one day in uniform and met a very angry Irish Setter. Once she saw that it was me, she stopped growling and came bounding towards me wanting to play. She got past the external appearance and realized I was still me, just in clothes she was not used to seeing me wear.

In other words, once we get to know a little about the person in question (IE vetting them to understand who they really are), the race issue becomes moot. Then we can have a dialogue about the issues without all the invectives and name calling. The issue is character. Obama has proved his character by his actions over the past two and a half years. In the words of the Prophet Daniel (a Jew, different culture, different look, different language, yet with character that stretches as far as the eye can see), : “ You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.”

To read more by Thomas A. McLoughlin, go to http://insearchofintelligentlife.com or http:docsboyblog.blogspot.com

Jump the Shark

The television season is being tweaked again and questions are already being put forth as to which shows will no longer be with us, adding to the ranks of unemployed thespians everywhere. Oh, the agony.

The people who should be unemployed are the screenwriters who serve up this drivel and expect the average American to sit and watch it. I thought Congress was trying to outlaw torture. The Yahoo! Home page has a recurring list of “Shows that are on the bubble”, meaning that their viewership is declining. And rightly so, most of the shows they mention on the major four networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox) deserve their status “on the bubble”.

I was born in 1959, at the beginning of the 60’s, ands all we had growing up was the three majors (ABC, CBS and NBC) with a local fourth network that played re-runs that we all loved. I watched Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights because there was only one television in the house (black and white, of course, with tubes in the back) and that’s what my parents wanted to watch. The Soaps were king of the afternoon (except on the fourth channel) and television was pretty mundane, with the most radical thing we saw was James T. Kirk (a white man) kissing Lt. Ohura (a black female) on Star Trek or the comedy of the Smothers Brothers.

Now, with hundreds of channels on cable, you have hundreds, if not thousands of options and there’s still not much to watch on television. Reality television shows have made celebrities out of people whose only claim to fame is their willingness to be humiliated in front of millions of viewers every week. And the list of people who are famous just because they are famous is growing. Fred Allen said back in 1950, “Television is a new medium. It’s called a medium because nothing is well-done.” Anne Landers once said, “Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.” Karl Marx once called religion the “opium of the people”. I remember that there was a cartoon by Berkley Breathed, “Bloom County”, where a computer monitor quoted Karl Marx’s view of religion and implied that this was no longer the case. It wasn’t religion, but mass media (i.e. television) that was the opium of the masses.

The term “jump the shark” comes from a Happy Days episode where Fonzi (Henry Winkler) is waterskiing and jumps over a caged shark in answer to a challenge. Imagine, if can remember that far back, Fonzi wearing swimming trunks, and his signature leather jacket, waterskiing. Then, in all the “coolness” that surrounded this character, having to jump over a caged shark in order to prove his bravery. The term is supposed to mean that the series in question has reached its peak and lost its audience appeal and is about to be cancelled. An interesting fact is that “Happy Days” continued for another seven years before finally being cancelled. But I digress.

I was talking with my brother the other day and he came to the conclusion that Network Television (the main three networks) has not put out anything new or original in decades. In fact, Hollywood is bankrupt as far as new concepts for movies. They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel when they put out “Yogi Bear: the Movie”. It was a cute cartoon in the 60’s. But a live action movie? Not so cute. My sister sais that there are some movies where you pay money to see them and actually lose part of your soul. At least you won’t be getting back the two hours you spent watching that thing back.

Shows that capture our imagination is what people want, like the plot where a “Geek Squad” nerd gets a mini-computer data base of all classified information concerning US national security infused into his brain was brilliant. Or the FBI agent whose brother is a math genius and uses mathematical equations to solve crimes. Or the guy who can tell if you’re lying by the micro expressions we all use and uses this skill to, again, solve crime? The problem is that these story lines, by their very nature, have a limited lifespan. How long before the “geek” becomes a “cool” CIA agent and marries his smokin’ hot female handler/partner? Or how many times can the FBI agent’s brother say, “I can use an algorithm to predict where the criminal is going to strike next” and still be interesting? After only a season or two, the public, as it is wont to do, gets bored with the predictability of the series and moves on to something new.

Most of Network Television programming has “Jumped the Shark” before a new series is even introduced. This is because most of Network Television’s programming is based on some gimmick to keep the viewer interested. “Bonanza” didn’t use a gimmick. It utilized the family dynamics of the Cartwright family and lasted 14 seasons on network television. Neither did “Mash”, a comedy about doctors and nurses in Korea during the conflict, which lasted 11 years and revolved around the ever changing life of a group of Army Medics in a time of war and their attempts to deal with their situation through humor.

Most people like television. It is one place where you can be opened up to whole new worlds while sitting in the comfort of your living room. For its potential, it is relatively inexpensive, and has the ability to change us in positive ways, to enrich society. Instead, we get “Jerry Springer” and “Oprah”, reality television that isn’t real, and more ways to shock and scare ourselves silly until we just sit in front of the television just accepting whatever comes into our homes without question. David Frost once said, “Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home.” Someone else said, “If television is not an idol that we worship, why are all the chairs in the living room facing it?”

To read more by Thomas A. McLoughlin, go to http://insearchofintelligentlife.com or http:docsboyblog.blogspot.com

The Point of the Cross

Christianity has been called a “slaughterhouse religion” with its emphasis on the painful, violent and bloody death of a man on what has become the symbol of that relationship. This weekend is Easter Weekend with tomorrow being Good Friday. A man died on a bizarre form of execution almost 2000 years and we call that good? Why is that good?

Until Jesus walked among us, we were without hope, living our lives in a fruitless day-to-day grind that eventually ended in a solemn ceremony where we were put back into the ground, a few words said for the comfort of those left behind and that was all there was to it. Or was that it?

Jesus didn’t come to earth to make us feel better about ourselves or to give us words of encouragement without substance. If anything, He came to point out that our lives were completely futile without the knowledge, and complete reliance on a God who desperately loved us and was determined that there be a way for us to spend eternity with Him. But in order to give us the Good News, He had to give us the Bad New first: We were completely undone and without hope in the world. Our lot was desperate and there was no hope. The Bad news is that if things did not change, we would spend a short time on this earth struggling to make ends meet only to spend a much longer time separated from the One who created us in a place that we did not belong, a place of misery and torment.

The Bad News could be summed up in just a few words: The Law. The Law was what we call the Old Testament. In it were all the rules and regulations that we were supposed to follow to keep our relationship with God alive and well. The problem with the Law is that you had to follow everything in the Law completely or you were guilty of breaking all the rules. “Well, rules were made to be broken”. Not these rules. These rules had severe penalties for running afoul of them. James 2:10 says “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” This would be like you being caught spitting on the sidewalk and then being convicted in a court of law of every crime the judge knew of, such as armed bank robbery, murder, sedition, infanticide, kidnapping, and wearing white after Labor Day. The Law was written to show us that we could not keep all the rules. There were just too many and they were too obscure for us to keep up with them all.

The Law was put in place to teach us about how God wanted us to live. The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 3:24-25, “So the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law.” Oh, and just obeying the Law wasn’t enough. You had to obey the spirit of the Law. It’s intent. You could keep the entire law perfectly and still miss the point entirely if you didn’t have the right attitude while keeping it. A little bit of pride that you’re doing your part and you’ve blown it. Oops.

Jesus was the only one who could keep the law in its entirety and do it right because He was the One who wrote the Law. And He knew it was too much. Then why did He write it that way? He wrote it that way in order for us to see that we needed God’s help. We, as a people, are a board mule. (In case you don’t know, a board mule is a mule that you have to hit across the head with a 2 x 4 to get its attention.) We had a problem and Jesus was (and still is) the answer.

Here’s where the cross comes in. The Old Testament tradition of sacrificing a lamb at Passover was a precursor to Our Good Friday Celebration. In the Old Testament, they celebrated Passover to commemorate the children of Israel just before they left Egypt, when they sacrificed a spotless lamb, put its blood on the sides and the tops of the doorposts, and ate the meat roasted over an open fire, along with bitter herbs and bread made without yeast. God then “passed over their houses when the firstborn male of ever household was killed” in order to get Pharaoh to let the children go. Jesus was to be that sacrificial Lamb. Revelation 13:8 calls Him “the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.” John the Baptist called Jesus the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.

This was no Freudian slip. When Jesus was died on the cross, Matthew 27:51 says that “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” This meant that God, through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, finally opened the way for man to enter the Holy of Holies (God’s presence) from then on without the sacrifice of another lamb or bull and without the intermediary of another human being, Jesus being our only intercessor. Hebrews puts it this way: “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” (Hebrews 4:16) It also says in Chapter 1:3, “After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.” The work was done and salvation for all men was now available. That’s what Jesus meant when He said “It is finished!” while on the cross.

Christianity without the cross is pointless. It is the symbol of the relationship God wants to have with all mankind (every man, woman, boy and girl), but it is also the key to that door that was locked for so very long. Easter is not just a time to dust off the bible and go to church, then afterwards gather with friends and family and have a big dinner and enjoy the nice weather, although to most people, that’s all it means. It is a time to celebrate a new relationship that God Himself made possible through the death of His Son, Jesus Christ. The bones of Mohammed are still in the grave. The bones of Abraham are still in the grave. The bones of Confucius are still in the grave. The bodies of the founders of every religion are still in their graves and all that is left is their bones. But Jesus alone left behind and empty grave because he rose from the dead and is alive today. Let this Easter be a beginning of a new relationship between you and God.

To read more by Thomas A. McLoughlin, go to http://insearchofintelligentlife.com or http:docsboyblog.blogspot.com