I think Obama's going to do very well in the Saddleback forum, but it's worth noting that Rick Warren is hardly the kind of figure to be validating.
JG: So America has a duty to help.
RW: The answer is, we must do all we can. People say America is not the policeman of the world. We may not be, but the Bible says, if you have been blessed, then you are to care for people who can't care for themselves, you are to speak up for people who can't speak for themselves, and to defend the defenseless.
JG: Some people argue that we're not so great ourselves.
RW: The difference is that there are no death squads in America. The worst you can get here is that you can get blogged, you can get Lewinskied, on the Internet. There is a difference between that and living under oppression, living with fear for your life. That's why whether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is beside the point. Saddam and his sons were raping the country, literally. And we morally had to do something. If you have a Judeo-Christian heritage, you have to believe it when God says that evil cannot be compromised with. It has to be resisted, it has to be overcome.
So invading Iraq based on lies is not bearing false witness, as long as the end goal is just? Good to know. And what a just end goal!
Also, it's clear that the worst that can happen in America or by Americans is that you get blogged, or Lewinskied. It's not like there are 2 million people in prison here or substantially amounts of prison rape, or punitive immigration raids on families. Nope, not here. We've got to make sure that we export our no-sin-no-suffering model to the rest of the world through violence.
I'm so glad this is the man hosting the first major Presidential forum.
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