People are thinking like I don’t have a plan, I hate doing it. So I was on one of the shows, and I said:
ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because of the oil that they took away, they have some in Syria, they have some in Iraq, I would bomb the shit out of them.
I would just bomb those suckers, and that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up ever single inch, there would be nothing left.
And you know what, you’ll get Exxon to come in there, and in two months, you ever see these guys? How good they are, the great oil companies, they’ll rebuild it brand new… And I’ll take the oil.
Donald Trump Calls Pope’s Criticism ‘Disgraceful’
Donald J. Trump said it was “disgraceful” that Pope Francis questioned his faith on Thursday and suggested that his presidency would be the answer to the Vatican’s prayers because he would protect it from terrorists if elected.
.. “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” Mr. Trump said.
“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened,” Mr. Trump said.
.. And Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University and a supporter of Mr. Trump, said that the pope had crossed a line.
“Jesus never intended to give instructions to political leaders on how to run a country,” Mr. Falwell told CNN.
Rome, Reformation, & Right Now
- Ted Cruz is cold, dark, calculating, intelligent, ideological to the fingertips — and therefore very troubling. I cannot shake the image of him trolling suffering Middle Eastern Christians for the sake of boosting his appeal to Evangelicals. I see him and an insult Churchill directed to a rival comes to mind: “He would make a drum out of the skin of his mother to sing his own praises.”
- And Cruz’s line about how he’s going to carpet bomb the Mideast to rid it of ISIS — really? You’re going to wipe out tens of thousands of innocent people for this cause? Cruz’s lines attempting to link ISIS’s success to the material decline of the US military was outrageous — as if ISIS succeeded because the US wasn’t spending enough money on defense. But it tells us that a Cruz administration will mean a windfall for defense contractors.
That doesn’t make the Reformation right, of course, but one does see how it was all but inevitable. Once the break happened, it proved impossible to contain the forces unleashed. “Sola scriptura” proved an impossible standard for building a new church, because various Reformation leaders had their own ideas about what the Bible “clearly” said.
.. At the same time, the rise of science, and the blind obstinacy of the Roman church in unnecessarily holding on to Aristotelian categories for understanding the natural world, created the false belief that religion is opposed to science.
.. He also makes it clear that the secular liberal narrative of uncomplicated Progress because of this is hopelessly naive. The Enlightenment tried to build a binding public ethic around Reason, but ran into the same problem that the Reformation did: who decides what counts as “reasonable”?
.. As Kierkegaard says, the trouble with life is it must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.
..Dostoevsky wrote that a person “cannot live without worshipping something.” Anyone who denies God must worship an idol—which is not necessarily a wooden or metal figure. In our time we have seen ideologies, groups, and leaders receive divine honors. People proud of their critical and discerning spirit have rejected Christ and bowed down before Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or some other secular savior.
.. Liberty, too, is likely to vanish; it becomes a heavy personal and social burden when no God justifies and sanctifies the individual in spite of all personal deficiencies and failures.
.. To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished? To what extent are those savings already severely depleted?
.. Even idealists whose good intentions for the human race are pure and strong are still vulnerable to fate because of the pride that causes them to act ambitiously and recklessly in history.
.. They identify as religious, even if they are backslidden. They support the traditional family, even if they come from and create broken homes. In other words, they are people who aspire to be more like social conservatives, though they lack the material and spiritual resources to become like them.
.. The crisis of authority and decay is by no means a top-down phenomenon. The institutions of American life — government, law, academia, religion, business, the market, the family and so forth — are in a crisis more severe than many of us have understood till now.
The Republican Conflation of Immigration and ISIS
But it’s also because they repeatedly turned questions about immigration into questions about Muslims and ISIS.
.. Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio about the problem of undocumented immigrants. He responded that, “I’m going to tell you exactly how we’re going to deal with it when I am president. Number one, we’re going to keep ISIS out of America.”
.. But politically, it serves a purpose. By putting ISIS at the center of their immigration rhetoric, Republican candidates make immigration seem more threatening and less ambiguous. It’s one thing to depict immigrants as people who depress wages and crowd schools. It’s another to depict them as potential killers. That utterly dehumanizes them... The answers by GOP candidates also play into a larger conservative effort to depict Mexican immigrants as, if not ISIS members, then at least dangerous. Immigrants actually commit crime at a lower rate than native-born Americans.