The following prayer is taken from scripture (Psalm 94) and it clearly applies to our times. If you are a believer, please pray this for our nation as we move into and through the election period.
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In a recent interview by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, National Public Radio journalist Juan Williams mounted a spirited, if not very factual, apologia for John Kerry. Williams had just then recently interviewed John Kerry and was well prepared for such a debate. Of the several topics that were discussed, employment and the economy figured prominently. At one point, Mr. O’Reilly confronted Williams with a simple bit of data—that the unemployment rate was a tick lower than it had been immediately prior to the reelection of Bill Clinton and cited this as evidence that the 2004 economic recovery had been creating jobs. Without permitting O’Reilly to complete the question, Williams shouted, “But what kind of jobs?” Delivering the typically demagogic leftist party line, he went on to assert that job creation during the recovery had largely been in low paying, poor quality, service sector jobs. The truth is that there has been job creation throughout the economy, and the assumption that service sector jobs are all just minimum wage burger flipper jobs is completely false.
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Jane Austen enjoyed a quite productive, though all too brief, career as a novelist in the early nineteenth century. She wrote six major works: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817 published posthumously), and Northanger Abbey (1818 published posthumously). All six have been produced, at one time or another, into some film adaptation. A comparison of the movies to the books is an unavoidable exercise though I suspect that moviemakers would prefer it otherwise. One assumes that the intended audience of movies adapted from books is not the readers of the books themselves but a much more general audience. That being the case, a certain amount of theatrical license is certainly understandable. What is not understandable—or even acceptable to my mind—is the practice of eviscerating a fine story for the purpose of injecting Hollywood's favorite themes of hatred for Western Civilization and obsession for sexual content. By way of analyzing this tendency, I would like to discuss the two movies that have been made from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.
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I must admit that I have felt something of despair during this presidential election cycle—a despair that I have not felt about politics since the 1992 election. Although I was quite upset then about the election of an air-headed imbecile to the Presidency, I also felt that George Bush Sr. had beaten himself by his own "pragmatism" about economics. It was, after all, his own tax increases in 1990 that had led to the brief dip in the economy afterward—this after having promised not to increase taxes. The current President Bush, however, has shown himself to be a man of integrity and worth. My occasional despair has arisen out of the continuous stream of lies and faulty logic that has emanated from the Kerry campaign. Moreover, the double standard that Republicans have long endured from the mainstream news media has reached the highest level that I have ever seen. The national news media is nothing more than the mouth of the Democrat Party with only heavily qualified, token pieces in favor of President Bush. Sometimes, it seems that lies are more powerful than truth, and I often despair of any truth being found in the entire process outside some vary narrow areas.
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