Nothing personal, Senator

At 11 p.m. Wednesday night I posted a striking photograph of Sen. Reid in which his expression of utter grimness and final hopelessness combined with cold and ruthless determination suggested to me something out of Paradise Lost—a soul who has lost all hope of the good, and who says, like Milton’s Satan, “Evil, be thou my good.” I felt that the photograph captured the inner character of the Democrats in their relentless push on the health care bill, the Democrats who don’t care how much damage they cause and what outrages they commit, who want to force their will on us in defiance of all good, all sense, all limits.

On Thursday, Sen. Reid’s wife, Landra, and their daughter, Lana Barringer, were seriously injured with non-life threatening injures in a car accident in Washington, D.C. Just so there is no misunderstanding, my comment on the photograph was not directed at Reid personally and did not involve any ill wishes on my part toward Reid as a person. It was a commentary on the psychological or spiritual meaning that the photograph had for me, on what it conveys about the leftist forces with which we are coping. When I see Reid generally, I don’t think, “there goes the spawn of the devil” My thoughts were related to the meaning of that particular photograph.

I wish Landra Reid and Lana Barringer full and speedy recovery.

* * *

Also, underscoring what I just said, below the photograph of Reid I quoted a famous passage from Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians in which he says that the forces of evil which threaten us and from which we ask God to protect us are not persons, not “flesh and blood”:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

At the same time, even though we are not fighting against persons, when we see a person, especially a person in power, whose expressions, behavior, and acts clearly suggest wickedness or a dictatorial will to power (I’m thinking at the moment of Nancy Pelosi), we need to point that out.

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Jeff W. writes:

Your quote from Ephesians is a good one, but when thinking about the American political class, I continually see evidence of the truth of Romans 1:21-22. “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

“Vain in their imaginations” here means incapable of thinking clearly in their own self-interest. A darkened heart means that one’s heart is dominated by such motives as envy, malice, or revenge.

This is God directing his wrath at his enemies. He makes them delusional so that their plans are self-defeating, and he makes them vicious so that they fight among themselves. Soon enough they destroy themselves.

In their push for Obamacare, liberals are working feverishly to destroy themselves, but their larger work of destruction is the bankrupting of the U.S. Treasury. After the Treasury is bankrupt, there will be nothing left of the liberal project except a bad memory and a lot of worthless paper money.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2010 12:06 PM | Send