Sunday Must-reads

The Anchoress has a beautiful essay today, Discernment is always grave…:

God gives the gift of faith, some folks give it back in service. God tells us “take and consume,” some give their lives back in return, saying, “Lord, take and consume,” it is an endless give-and-take, and a very great mystery of love.

It is not easy to be a man or woman of God, to live a vowed and consecrated life, regardless of whether that consecration involves a celibate life lived in community, or in a humble rectory, or in a hermitage, or a life lived in chaste marriage. In each case, the life is busy with the Work of God, and somehow - even perhaps with the hermit - the supernatural must balance with the natural, the charity to which we are called will be challenged by our fellows, by our feelings, by the times and by our own tempraments.

Today, perhaps take five minutes to sit quietly and hold in prayer your priest, your pastor or someone else you may know of who has made the grave offering of not merely “loving” God, but of “being poured out like a libation” for the benefit of his or her fellow sheep, in service to a passionate and intensely loving God who uses up every last inch on a spool of thread and wears down every pencil to its nub, so that nothing is wasted or cast aside.

Dr. Sanity says "Let's Discuss Bush Derangement Syndrome Again" (hat tips to Anchoress and Powerline):

What makes Bush Hatred completely insane however, is the almost delusional degree of unremitting certitude of Bush's evil; while simultaneously believing that the TRUE perpetrators of evil in the world are somehow good and decent human beings with the world's intersts at heart.

This psychological defense mechanism is referred to as "displacement".

One way you can usually tell that an individual is using displacement is that the emotion being displaced (e.g., anger) is all out of proportion to the reality of the situation. The purpose of displacement is to avoid having to cope with the actual reality. Instead, by using displacement, an individual is able to still experience his or her anger, but it is directed at a less threatening target than the real cause. In this way, the individual does not have to be responsible for the consequences of his/her anger and feels more safe--even thought that is not the case.

This explains the remarkable and sometimes lunatic appeasement of Islamofascists by so many governments and around the world, while they trash the US and particularly Bush. It explains why there is more emphasis on protecting the "rights" of terrorists, rather than holding them accountable for their actions (thier actions, by the way are also Bush's fault, according to those in the throes of BDS). Our soldiers in Iraq are being killed because of Bush--not because of terrorist intent and behavior. Terrorist activity itself is blamed on Bush no matter where it occurs.

The Powerline post on Dr. Sanity's diagnosis is also worth a read.

Don Surber examines Bush's Gettysburg (Hat tip Instapundit):

From a small town in Pennsylvania, the president came to finally answer critics of an increasingly unpopular war, a war that Democrats hoped would sweep them into office in the next election.

Tigerhawk has a lengthy essay "Considering dissent and limited war II" (Hat tip Instapundit):

When a democratic nation is at war, there are inevitably those who will object to the way in which the war is being fought, or that it is being fought at all. If the war is manifestly for the country’s survival or otherwise of great moment, the objectors will be so marginalized that they and their arguments will have no effect on the politics of the country, the morale of its military, or the tactics of the enemy.

Dissent can, however, have an enormous impact on the means by which a democracy wages a limited war, the persistence with which it wages the war, or whether it wages the war at all. This post considers the objectives of domestic dissent to limited wars, the impact of anti-war dissent on the means of fighting the war and the morale of the soldiers at arms, the different types of anti-war dissent and, finally, whether some objectives and types of dissent are more moral than others.