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Despite all the dire predictions of voter fraud, voter intimidation, malfunctioning machines and a replay of Florida (or worse) all over again, the election seems to have gone off relatively smoothly and resulted in a clear, if not terribly substantial, victory for the President. It reminds me of the hysterical cries of impending Apocalypse on January 1, 2000 that turned out to be so much, well, hysteria.

My fears: That the President will take this election as a mandate to engage in more risky war-making. Though this fear is tempered by the fact that the sheer amount of resources we have committed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, along with the Administration’s depleted political capital on the international front, should constrain the amount of foreign adventurism a 2nd Bush administration will be able to engage in.

My hopes: That the President will continue to hold the line against the cultural forces that want to create new forms of human life for experimentation and commercial exploitation. For my money, the “abolition of man” may well turn out to be the issue of the 21st century, representing the triumph of the technological will to power over any sense of natural limits. Bush has been on the side of the angels as far as this goes.

…but it looks like my guy David Cobb is not going to pull it off. Oh well, there’s always 2008!

From the LA Times:

“There’s no way I’m going for Bush. That much I know,” said Moore, 46. He remains undecided between Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and a third-party candidate. …

Others are like Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East.

“It’s hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there,” Urcavich said.

“I’m very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion,” he added. “If I’m a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war.”

Read more here.

(via Godspy)

Well, my civic duty has been fulfilled. I got up early this morning and made it to the polls by 7. Curiously, in my racially mixed neighborhood everyone at the polling place seemed to be a white middle-class professional or college student. The mood was monolithically pro-Kerry. If anyone there was voting for Bush, they weren’t about to admit it.

After weeks (months?) of mulling that regular readers are all-too familiar with, I pulled the lever (or, actually pushed the button) for David Cobb of the Green Party. Though I disagree with the Greens on some (mostly social) issues, they are staunchly anti-war/anti-interventionist and favor a more humane and decentralized political and economic system (including opposition to factory farming). You could even say, as I’ve argued before, that the Greens represent a genuinely conservative position.

As Cobb put it in an interview:

For Republicans, the Greens offer true conservatism, which means keeping the government out of your personal business, out of your bedroom and out of your library. A true conservative would never support the so-called “Patriot Act;” nor would a true patriot for that matter. A true political conservative would recognize that public resources, such as forests, parks and oceans, should be conserved for use and enjoyment by future generations.

Also, I think it’s important in principle for voices outside of the mainstream to be heard. Some commentators have urged the Democrats to “get serious” about the war on terror by adopting essentially the same foreign policy as the GOP, thus ensuring the voters have no meaningful choice, and the Dems seem all too willing to comply. Not to mention that I thought the Democrat (sic!) Party deserved to be punished for its Machieavellian maneuvering to keep Nader off the ballot here in the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Despite agreeing with President Bush’s efforts to restrict partial-birth abortion and government-funded embryonic stem-cell research as well as his approach to other bioethical issues (I think the President’s Council on Bioethics is one of the bright spots of this administration), I couldn’t vote in good conscience for the President because of the ill-conceived war in Iraq and what strikes me as an approach to governing that is secretive, autocratic and lacking in accountability. However, neither could I back Sen. Kerry whose extremist views on abortion* and failure to distinguish himself on issues of war and peace keep him from even meriting the place of “lesser evil” as far as I’m concerned.

My ideal political party would embody an across-the-board recognition of the non-instrumental value of all life – something like a cross between a Green, a “Red” Tory and a “Consistent Life” party. Sadly, given the political lay of the land in the USA, no such party seems likely anytime soon.

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*But wait, the reader may ask, aren’t the Greens, if anything, more extreme on the abortion issue than John Kerry? Yes, but unlike Kerry, David Cobb will have no opportunity to implement those policies. Furthermore, I believe that the underlying green philosophy is more congenial to the pro-life position than the liberal-individualist brand of moral relativism that seems to be ascendant in the Democrat Party. Greens emphasize the interconnections between all life and the obligation to care for those weaker than us, an obligation that logically extends to protecting human life at its most vulnerable stages. Green icons like the Catholic E.F. Schumacher clearly saw this connection.

Keith Burgess-Jackson offers his philosophy of voting and makes his case for Bush.

Jim Henley goes deeper into the foibles of the liberal hawks:

Now a lot of the disenchanted liberal hawks I know complain less about brutality than about mismanagement. In this they take their lead from the Kerry campaign, which has focused its criticism on the Bush administration’s incompetence and “failure to win the peace.” Complain that Bush committed “too few troops to secure the peace” and you can, for possibly enough listeners to get you elected, attack the incumbent without sounding “soft.”…

We invaded Iraq with the force we did because it was the only politically viable way to have the war at all. Until well along the buildup phase when the familiar “close ranks” phenomenon hit the American public, support for immediate military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was tepid. The Bush Administration’s political people knew perfectly well that a bigger, more disruptive deployment and less cakewalk talk risked sinking the whole deal. To say “We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq with such a small force” is to say “We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq.” It’s just not saying it forthrightly.

Read more here.

For what it’s worth, I think the liberal hawks were somewhat naïve in thinking they could have the kind of war they wanted on their terms. “Liberation” always seemed, at best, a secondary consideration in the administration’s public case for war. And any war for liberation, if such things are to be undertaken, has to be judged by its prospects for success, not just the good intentions that may lie behind it.

The “liberal hawks” who plumped for war with Iraq are now deserting the president in droves. Andrew Sullivan, Paul Bermam, et al. have endorsed Kerry rather than the man who acted on their vision. Is this just fair-weather hawkery or something worse? Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh says:

These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments. Ignatieff dismisses the humanitarian intervention as a “fantasy.” Sullivan has in recent days seized on the nebulous circumstances surrounding the disappearance of explosives at Al Qaqaa as evidence that Bush failed to keep order in postwar Iraq. Jarvis tells Reason, “though I think the execution of the war itself was good—Rumsfeld is really smart—the aftermath has been really f[*]cked up.” Friedman declares, “Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team, and we are more alone in the world than ever.” Zakaria calls the president “strangely out of touch,” unaware that his “attitude” is responsible for the problems of postwar Iraq. Pollack condemns “the reckless, and often foolish, manner in which this administration has waged the war and the reconstruction.” For Kaplan, the only question is whether the Bush administration is “reckless or clueless.” Berman is now relieved to recall that even while championing the invasion he was cautioning against the president’s “rhetoric, ignorance, and Hobbesian brutishness,” and declaring himself “‘terrified’ at the dangers [Bush] was courting.” Even Hitchens, while standing by Bush’s side (temporarily, as it turned out), criticized the administration’s “near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.”

This is a neat arrangement of responsibility by the liberal hawks: All the blame falls on the president, none on themselves. Bush’s former supporters channel what is now the overwhelming conventional wisdom that the administration (in the person of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld) failed to provide a large enough force to run the country adequately. Leave aside the question about just how large a force would be adequate, given that even under the current deployment the armed services are strained to meet their commitments and relying on callups of the Individual Ready Reserve to fill manpower gaps. Ignore for a moment how 300,000, or 500,000, or a million, non-Arabic-speaking troops would prevent, for example, an insider from helping massacre 50 Iraqi police recruits. Under any conditions, the liberal hawks’ brand of armchair generalship is stunningly glib.

Read more here.

I would say that vegetarianism is the diet of hope, an eschatological diet. It’s not morally obligatory, though it’s morally commendable, because it’s an impossible diet. No matter what we eat, we’re going to take away food from other animals. Even if we turn all of America into cropland we will inflict suffering on animals because you have to keep animals out of the field.

One problem with vegetarianism is that it often gives rise to self-righteousness, a sense of holier-than-thou purity. It can be schismatic, which I think is why the church has seldom embraced it.

It’s a diet of witnessing to your hope that, in the end, God will restore the entire world to God’s original intentions. That God will redeem humans and animals alike.

—Stephen H. Webb

The Other Journal describes itself as “an intersection of theology and culture.”

The current issue focuses on the election and features interviews with Stanley Hauerwas, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Walter Brueggemann and others.

Kerry voter Hugo Schwyzer puts tomorrow’s election in perspective:

Both liberal and conservative Christians are too enamored of the power of the secular state to transform the hearts and minds and lives of its citizens and the citizens of the world. Yes, the moral character of the ruler matters. Yes, the policies of the state matter — and good Christians can differ in good conscience as to what those policies ought to be. But the God I worship had little time for great leaders when he walked the earth. Jesus was political, yes — but His politics were far more radical than anything any modern politician could possibly espouse. To claim Jesus’ endorsement for any party, any candidate, is unbiblical and profoundly offensive.

I’m tired of the question, “What Would Jesus Do?” Though a useful corrective to the self-absorbed, the question assumes that there is always a clear answer. Sometimes, the answer is clear. More often, it isn’t. I’m no bible expert, but one thing I see in the Gospel is Jesus consistently confounding the expectations of his followers. He tends to do the unexpected, the surprising, the scandalous. Even those who knew Him best were taken aback time and time again.

So do I know how Jesus wants me to vote? No, I don’t. I don’t think anyone else knows either. I know He calls us to service, sacrifice and giving. But beyond that, a humble respect for mystery does not allow me to go. I’m voting for Kerry. I want him to win. But I would never, ever, be so bold as to say that he is God’s candidate. Of course, I also categorically reject the suggestion that the incumbent is God’s favorite in this race. Ultimately, Bush and Kerry are competing to be the most powerful prince in the contemporary world’s greatest principality. And while Christians can and should take an active interest in the affairs of this world, there is no question that real justice, real transformation, and real hope cannot come from the princes of this world.

Read more here.