Saddleback? More like Saddlecack

I just finished going through the transcripts of the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, which took place at Rick Warren's California megachurch late Saturday night. Unfortunately, the transcripts are in all caps and in bad need of a cleanup, but legible enough.

Now, as I've previously argued in the YDN, I wholeheartedly disagree with the concept of faith-based forums (and of media-sponsored religious tests in general) and this one was hardly an exception. Granted, Warren—who wrote A Purpose-Driven Life—tried to keep it less ridiculous than the CNN gang did during previous debates. (Anderson Cooper's unintentionally hilarious remark to Mike Huckabee, "Governor, I do have to press, though; the question from the viewer was, ‘What would Jesus do?’ " is forever etched in my mind.)

Who is Rick Warren to vet our presidential candidates? Sure, he's a successful businessman who has sold 25 bajillion books and is the de facto spiritual leader to 50 gazillion people. But he's a preacher. As a Protestant myself, I have great respect for pastors, especially ones whose positive messages reach so many. And I also believe that they should not be involved in government at a high level in their capacity as pastors, as Warren clearly was during the forum.

For all the traditional media's failings in its role as the primary watchdog of government, clergy of any stripe are not a fit replacement. Even bloggers would be better. (How about Kos and some conservative counterpart as a joint replacement for Bob Schieffer on Oct. 15?) If it were up to me, newspaper executive editors (or political editors) would moderate all presidential debates—I think they're usually excluded because they don't have experience being on TV.

The point is, I don't care, and Americans shouldn't care, how a candidate's faith is going to affect his policies. I just want to know what his policies are, and that his personal beliefs are not going to affect what will be best for the nation. If the president has to do something he feels goes against his Christian values, such as executing Osama bin Laden rather than turning the collective cheek of the American military, that's between him and God. I don't even want to know that not bringing a terrorist to justice was even a consideration.

That's not to say that, for example, torture is justified if it is the most expedient way of gathering information for public benefit. We still need to operate under a moral and ethical standard, but one that is inspired by human justice, not some interpretation of "divine" justice. We should not torture at all, not because God says we shouldn't, but because the best policy is to uphold international law and gain the respect of our own citizens and the rest of the world by our restraint and commitment to equal justice under law. In the long term, nothing good can come of compromising particularly the latter ideal; hence, the best policy is to stick to it. (Lance, I can't wait to hear how Eastern philosophy might find a way to contradict me on this.)

But I digress. Let's say for the sake of argument that the Saddleback Forum was a legitimate test of presidential qualifications. The pundits have made much, as Bill Kristol put it, Obama's "windy generalities" and McCain's "crisp," "colorful" anecdotes. (Speaking of colorful anecdotes, McCain's story about a fellow POW's cross drawn in the sand sounds suspiciously like a tale from the life of Solzhenitsyn.)

I would argue that Obama's general answers put him above McCain's embarrassing slipups, plagiarism and echoes of Bush. Here's a couple of examples, edited as best I can from the terrible transcript:

We must respect the entire territory of Russia, excuse me, the Russians must respect the entire territorial integrity of Georgia, and there's only 4 million people in Georgia, my friends.

Did McCain just start that sentence from the perspective of the Russians? Guess so. Just an adorable "I'm so old I forget who's on what side, like Iran and al-Qaida and Sunnis and Shiites, derp" moment, I suppose. And now apparently the size of the country is more relevant than, oh, I dunno, the fact that Georgia started the conflict with the intention of luring the U.S. into a confrontation with Russia? It's a little more complicated than your bluster would suggest, senator.

I say to them [the people who don't want this forum held in a church] that I'd like to be in every venue in America.

Yeah, with your portrait in every living room and every house of worship, with CIA spooks listening outside every door just waiting for someone to criticize the government. I bet you'd like that. Seriously, I've had enough of George Bush's big-brother, screw-privacy attitude toward the citizenry, and careless comments like this just make me more paranoid than I probably should be.

Let's ... send the message to the Russians that this behavior is not acceptable in the 21st century.

Speaking of Bush, this is exactly the inanely hypocritical phrase that the president has been parroting all week. You mean invading sovereign nations and toppling their governments because of their resources or a sphere-of-influence issue is not acceptable in this century? Gosh, I hope that's not exactly what we've been doing in Iraq...

We won the Cold War, as I mentioned earlier, without firing a shot because of our etiology.

This one had me LOLing. It's obviously the fault of the computer that generated the transcript, which for some reason saw fit to substitute "etiology" (the spelling more familiar to Latin majors is "aetiology") for "ideology." But the idea that we triumphed over the Evil Empire because of our folktales about how the institutions of our society came to be is just great, and very Roman—McCain must have been reading his Livy. (Another definition of "etiology" apparently has to do with studying the causes of diseases. That one actually could be true, if somehow the Russians had all gotten SARS or something and we didn't since we know how it was caused, thereby ending the Cold War. But they didn't, so the point is moot.)

For anyone still reading, I'll close with the observation that Bill Kristol is an idiot and doesn't deserve a point-by-point refutation. And to all those who are concerned that McCain's "cone of silence" at the church was breached, and that's why he was able to give such snappy answers, stop worrying. He's probably too senile to remember the questions anyway, even if he did gain such an advantage. Chalk this one up to luck, solid coaching and a friendly setting.