There is another word

From Front Page Magazine:

John McCain is one lucky fellow. Of course you can make your own luck, as the saying goes. That's what McCain did with great courage to survive five-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton. And he made his own luck again by advocating a surge of troops in Iraq that later proved to be successful.

In winning the Republican presidential nomination, however, McCain has mostly been just plain lucky, no thanks to his own fortitude or foresight. Conservatives inadvertently aided him by failing to line up behind a single rival. Mike Huckabee ruined Mitt Romney's strategy by beating him in Iowa. And Rudy Giuliani helped by pulling out of New Hampshire and fading in Florida, allowing McCain to sneak ahead and win primaries in both states.

Now Democrats are boosting McCain's chances of winning the presidency by prolonging the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. "They are eating their own," says Dick Morris, the onetime adviser to the Clintons. The result, for the moment anyway, is that McCain is inching ahead in polls matching him against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

So long as Clinton stays in the race, the bitter divide among Democrats will widen--to McCain's advantage. And since Clinton still has a chance of winning the nomination, she's bound to continue her campaign at least through the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 and the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6--and probably until the verdict of Democratic super-delegates becomes clear sometime this summer.

No matter who ultimately wins the nomination, the prospects for electing a Democratic president this fall will have declined. And through no machinations of his own, McCain's chances of winning will have improved. There's a name for that happenstance: luck.

There is another word for what Mr. Barnes is talking about.

Providence \Prov"i*dence\, n. [L. providentia: cf. F. providence: (Theol.) A manifestation of the care and superintendence which God exercises over his creatures; an event ordained by divine direction.

In the excellent HBO miniseries John Adams, which is currently airing, Abigail Adams asks George Washington if he thinks it possible that the terrible losses America is suffering in its war of independence could be God's punishment for the sin of slavery.

Like Mel Gibson's character in The Patriot I fear that our sins have returned to visit us and that the price may be too terrible to bear. Like a chess player who sees that he will be checkmated in three moves and that there is absolutely nothing that he can do to prevent it the United States has been brought to a position where we have an upcoming presidential election with absolutely no possibility of a good outcome. At least at the presidential level.

What do we do about it? I have no idea other than to go to polls and elect as many conservatives as possible to the House, Senate and state and local offices.