Squirrel!

My dog is pretty well behaved. He sits, shakes paws, gives high fives, lies down, rolls over, and even stays put on most attempts. He is very adept at protecting us from the mailman who assaults the house each weekday, and the garbage men haven’t gotten closer to the house than the fence before being discovered. My dog will even stick close to my side while we take a walk. However, just like every other super being, he has a weakness – the squirrel!

Even the best behaved best friend can show weakness and whenever that squirrel, or sometimes the unwanted cat, crosses his path, baser instincts overtake his training and he turns his focus to the passing animal. As pet owners we laugh at the squirrel because we know it is just a passing fancy, a shiny object if you will, that is gone as quickly as it appears, not because it can’t stay, but because by its very nature its presence is fleeting. It pops up, causes its disturbance, and then it is gone as quickly as it came and we are left trying to regain control of our once stoic and masterful animal.

Outgoing Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) gets it, and while I am no fan of Sen. McCaskill, I have to agree with her. Recently CNN ran an article in which McCaskill warned incoming Socialist and Freshman Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that her quick rise from obscurity would end in an equally quick return to ambiguity if voters realized she (O-Cortez) is all rhetoric. As CNN quoted, “The rhetoric’s cheap. Getting results is a lot harder.”[1] Fox News ran a follow-up citing O-Cortez’ reply, which was that she was, “disappoint[ed]. McCaskill promised she’d ‘100% back Trump up’ on his anti-immigrant rhetoric & lost.”[2]

So if you are keeping track, that’s two obscure Democrats vying for your attention by disparaging each other.

That’s politics.

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” (2 Tim 4:3, NIV)

After all, what is politics if it isn’t lies told to people who want to be lied to? If I ask you to name one single politician who, throughout your entire lifetime, was elected and maintained integrity and honesty throughout his or her full tenure in Washington, could you do it? Now if I asked you to name ten politicians who as one point or another lied to get a vote – could you do that?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Unlike God’s good news of the Gospel, politics is Satan’s playground. Politicians make deals with the devil daily to remain in power and to sway your opinion. They lie to the camera and to their constituents because, well, we commoners don’t really understand how Washington works. To get things done, one must become a member of a coalition and that means compromising on some truths and principles. So, because saving an illegal immigrant’s life is more important right now than saving an unborn legally American citizen’s life, we should shut down Government and take a stand against a wall.

How about this? How about we take the $530M in annual federal funding given to Planned Parenthood[3] and use that to fund the wall. They would still have roughly one billion in revenue to operate, but they would have to weigh how many lives they kill with that money against how many they save. Or perhaps we could tap into the more than $1.1 billion the Federal Government spends annually on congressional pensions.[4] After all, shouldn’t our “servant leaders” in Washington be willing to take one for the team in protecting the entire nation from uncontrolled illegal immigration?

But then again, maybe a wall is just some shiny object meant to distract us from the truth – that the politicians own the narrative and can sway our emotions at their whim.

If we ground ourselves in sound doctrine, regardless of rhetoric or which side of the aisle we fall, we won’t be so easily swayed.

“Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test all things. Hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.” (1 Thes 5:20-22, Berean)

[1] https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/12/30/claire-mccaskill-ocasio-cortez-shiny-new-object-raju-sot-ip-vpx.cnn

[2] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-responds-to-mccaskill-over-criticsm

[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/05/429641062/fact-check-how-does-planned-parenthood-spend-that-government-money

[4] https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_pension_spending_00.html