Troy, you forgot about his deft touch with humor.

スツーさん、高校のとき、私も東京に住んでいました。　日本が大好きですよ。ポドカーストを聞くありがとございます！

Well, that's the question.  Or, put another way, is it possible to govern a nation using Christianity taken to its fullest?  The general consensus seems to be not: Christianity governs the church and the souls of men; it can't be used to govern the affairs of state.  It can influence them, to be sure, but the Bible isn't a constitution. 

Given that, an individual man who wishes to live as Christ did, following His teachings in letter and spirit, will at some point inevitably chafe under certain requirements of a job in public office.  Of course, of all regimes in history, the U.S. does the very best job of allowing people to live out the tenets of their faith in a way consistent with the good of the nation.  But that doesn't meant it always does it perfectly.

Interesting, Larry--I gather that your argument is that when a man takes the oath of office, his highest moral obligation is to his duties as president, above all other competing moral claims? 

I suspect many will agree with you.  I wonder, though, what this implies for seriously religious candidates (especially given the degree to which religion is used on the campaign trail).  Does a president absolutely need to put Country before God from the time he is inaugurated until the time his successor is?  I wonder if the question were put to all of today's GOP candidates--As president, would you put Country before God?--how they would answer; I also wonder how the public would respond to those answers.

Good point about the nukes, James, though to play Devil's advocate: Four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we no longer had a monopoly on the bomb (and relative peace intervened). After that point, there was a counterbalance, and the bombs got progressively worse; the end of WWII, it could be argued, was the only narrow window in which a-bombs could be used without MAD.

And, yes, failure to act can be just as gravely immoral.  It just seems that in war, a president is going to have blood on his hands; the question is how much.  (Have addressed the moral/necessary distinction in other comments.)  It's why I'm grateful not to be president, and very (and humbly) grateful for people who make those decisions for me.

Agree, Claire, that the more grave moral failing in the war was in respect of the Holocaust.  There were several discrete failures to act that, combined, produced the larger failure. But I think the most serious had nothing to do with military action; it would have been an entirely bloodless way of saving untold numbers of lives.  Why didn't we completely open our shores to the Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in the years leading up to the war and during? 

 Robert Lux and Claire: Good point about the area bombings.  Those, too, were horrible; the most memorable thing I read senior year of history in high school was a series of essays on the Dresden and Hamburg bombings, and about the effects of the firestorms that they provoked. 

My point, though, is that any *one* conventional weapon used to take out a military target was not comparable to the *one* atomic bomb.  That it was possible to use a conventional bomb (even though the Allies in those cases chose not to) without intending for your casualties to be mostly civilian--something simply not possible with the a-bomb.

And though I'm not a historian, from what I've read of accounts of both the Dresden and Hamburg bombings and the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I do still think that the atomic weapon is simply in its own category of destruction.  Call them kumquats and oranges if you like, but they're still not the same fruit...

Thanks for the recommendation, katievs. I had actually ordered that book from Amazon a few days ago (I'm planning to visit Nagasaki in the fall), along with Takashi Nagai's own memoir, the Bells of Nagasaki. (Semi-related, I understand that the "angelus bell" of the old Urakami Cathedral was one of the few artifacts to survive the bombing and ensuing fire; I think it still rings out from the new cathedral built in its place.) 

So now I'm really looking forward to reading the books; thanks for validating my Amazon habits. 

 And one more thing: This tendency has, I think, conditioned us to want to be able to call every act of war done on our behalf as "moral."  This opens the door to significant outrage when necessary acts of war are perceived as not moral: See Vietnam. In other words, a practice that many of us on the right champion opens the door to anti-Americanism from the left. 

I think it would be better to separate utility from morality, and have a quiet appreciation of the fact that what it takes to win wars will not always allow us to sleep soundly at night.  This prevents two extremes: Papering over horrific and likely immoral acts (like the a-bombs), and also tying the hands of our defenders to the point that they can do only what the professional ethicists approve. 

The middle way--and, I posit, the healthier way--is to accept the decoupling of morality from necessity.  Currently, that's how I'm approaching the a-bombs.

Continued (ah, Ricochet comment limits):

Part of why I'm curious about this is because I think we have a tendency to seek to justify as moral things that were not moral, but were necessary.  For some people, what is necessary (or simply advantageous--the lesser of two evils) *is* moral.  That's not how I define it, though, and I suspect that's not how a lot of other people define it, either.

The danger in this, I think, is that it actually cheapens our appreciation of what people who are responsible for defending us have to do on our behalf.  Many of us, particularly on the right, argue that whatever is done in America's interests is morally right.  I think that is by and large true because of the way America conducts itself in war, and because of the amazing heart and discipline and honor of our troops.  But it is not *always* true; the a-bombs, I think, may have been an exception.

And to the extent that we reflexively back-justify strategically necessary actions as moral ones, we fail to recognize the sacrifices of people who place our safety above their own comfort of conscience.

 I wonder if the distinction I'm making is too subtle, but based on the comments, I want to reiterate it nonetheless:

My current position is that it was probably right for Truman, *as president of the United States, responsible for the lives of our troops and for the security and global interests of our nation*, to use the bombs.  Whether it was moral--right for him as a human being with a soul to account for--of that, I'm less certain.

So as for the arguments in defense of Truman's using the bomb: Mostly, I don't think we disagree. As president, he probably had to.

The broader question I'm trying to get at is whether being president required him to suspend strictly moral judgment.  (Also, I'm coming at this from a very specific framework for defining morality, which was not Truman's.)  In other words, is acting immorally necessarily part of the job description for someone in such a position of leadership?

Not disputing that at all, Dave. As I said in the post, I think I agree with Fr. Miscamble that sometimes immoral actions are simply necessary for people who have responsibility for the security of nations and other people. Personally, I wouldn't want to have to be in that position; I recognize that I have that luxury only because of people who are; for that, I am extraordinarily grateful.

Moreover, as I also argued in my post, I think we can put Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a separate category--that there is something uniquely hideous about the atomic bomb. There has never been anything like it in war before or after. So it's quite different from labeling Desert Storm aggression.

And for the record, almost everything the US military does today I would not call "immoral." Far from it: They are and have been a great force for good.

Well, there's plenty about these women to drive the left batty without their motherhood. That said, I wonder if they confront an issue that affects women more generally. Because of custom and biological necessity, the decision to raise children will almost always require a greater investment of time (and time away from a profession) by the mother. No matter how dedicated the father is, this is just...true. 

So when a woman in politics is having her resume compared to a male competitor's, her motherhood takes on a greater significance than his fatherhood. Her parental responsibilities probably consumed more time and effort than his did as they were both building the other qualifications they would need to be president. We should then take her family "resume" into greater account than his when comparing their accomplishments.

This may be why so much of the discussion surrounding Bachmann and Palin focuses on their motherhood.

Sorry to return to this so late, but a couple of thoughts. First, it doesn't seem fair to take Bruni's George Washington example at face value. The man may never have sired children, but he certainly raised them: Martha's from a previous marriage, and two of Martha's grandchildren. This gets to Peter's point about the nature of fatherhood: It's not just obeying a mindless urge (gerbil style), but rather making a conscious decision to take responsibility for the development of new human beings, shepherding them into adulthood. Men and women have a choice about whether to take on this responsibility; it's what separates us from animals. But whether that choice happens in the decision to procreate in the first place, or in the moment when one decides to adopt a child or otherwise raise someone else's child (a la Washington), it's functionally the same choice--and says an enormous amount about the person who makes it.

 Bill, I would add only that if people are interested in understanding our national finances, including and especially the sorry state of entitlements, they should read everything by Jim Capretta. He is a walking one-man policy shop.  (And, I might add, frequent National Affairs contributor.)  And just a super-nice guy.

Incidentally, "tax expenditures"--the "evil trope of the left"--is simply the technical term for these preferences/loopholes/whatever you want to call them, a phrase set down in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and still used by policymakers today.   According to Marron, the point in the initial legislation was to acknowledge that many of these provisions are in fact akin to government spending programs--an acknowledgment that limited-government types should welcome, not resist... no?