Dancing On The Graves Of Reputations

In 1980, Jimmy Carter, in the same position as Trump (the virtual incumbent), won Iowa by 60% against Teddy Kennedy - but still went on to lose the general election.

Trump barely got 50% in Iowa.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 17, 2024

He knows he’s lying. What a pathetic shell of a person this once respected neurosurgeon has become. This is what loyalty to Trump does to people. Empties their souls and turns them into morally empty vacuums. https://t.co/AQ6s0knQwu

— Fred Wellman (@FPWellman) January 17, 2024

I've known a lot of doctors and lawyers who were “whited sepulchers” and otherwise dumb as hammers outside their field of expertise. Carson didn’t “become” something any more than Giuliani did. There’s a reason Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter don’t decay in old age, and the single word for it is: “integrity.” I don’t blame Trump for this; I blame him for making it publicly acceptable. Carson and Giuliani bear the burden for being themselves.

Question: Do you believe that Joe Biden’s presidency is God’s will?

Johnson: It must’ve been God’s will pic.twitter.com/XXO5pEQa0g

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 17, 2024

He actually preached it round AND square:

"Do you believe that Joe Biden's presidency is God's will?" a reporter asked at a GOP leadership news conference. 

"Oh, I know where you're going with this," Johnson laughed. "Okay. So I said in my speech before I took the gavel that look, I'm — I'm a Bible-believing Christian, right? Bible-believing Christian believes what the Bible says, right? The Bible says that God is the one that raises up people in authority. I believe God is sovereign." 

"We all are given equal rights and value, and that's something that we defend," he remarked. "So if you believe all those things, then you believe that God is the one that allows people to be raised in authority. It must have been God's will then." 

"That's my belief, right?" Johnson added. "But I think that a nation makes a decision collectively because we're given the free will to do that. And I think we're going to make a much better choice as a country coming up in this election cycle."

So, we the people decide for God what God’s will is. Convenient, ain’t it?

Reinhold Niebuhr was our last, great public theologian. By which I mean he was an advocate for a theology of the polis. He would point out the proper question was not “Did God choose this President?,” but what is the proper relationship between morality, which requires sacrifice from the individual(if only of self-interest), and society, which must seek to preserve itself?

The question for the individual is not, “Who did God raise up?,” but: “Are you properly humble before God?” The question for society is: “How best do we preserve our ideals?” You will note those are fundamentally different concerns.