Michael Gerson, The Boiling Frog that Finally Jumped…Maybe

Perhaps you know the parable.  How do you boil a frog alive?

Don’t throw the frog into boiling water.  It will jump out.  Rather, turn a stove burner on to low heat.  Fill a kettle with water at room temperature.  Put your wiggling, green frog into the kettle.  Set the kettle onto the burner.  Wait…

Supposedly, as the water temperature slowly rises, the frog – being a cold-blooded creature – will enjoy the sauna without alarm.  Eventually, the cooperative frog allows itself to be cooked alive without ever objecting to the rising water temperature.

I have enough of a conscious that I’ve never tested the truth of this parable (have you?), but it serves as a popular warning against the dangerous allurements of compromising one’s conscience.  How many compromises does it take before principle and morality become waterlogged labels tossed by deceased idealists into the world’s pragmatic stew called “the ends justify the means?”

I don’t know.  Maybe Michael Gerson could tell us.

Gerson, now a columnist with the Washington Post, has become one of president Trump’s most vocal, conservative critics.  And I admire him for taking up the cause of repeating out loud that this president has no clothes.

Gerson prints what few other Republicans are willing to say out loud (except behind closed doors).  He appears to be working as a conservative conscience (in a kinda, sorta way) for an otherwise fetid Republican party that misplaced its public service conscience years ago – undoubtedly lost in the fancy parlor of some corporate contributor.

A graduate of Wheaton College, Gerson is noteworthy because he claims the mantle of “evangelical Christian” while openly condemning the boot-licking, brown-nosing antics of those religious-right leaders and their millions of followers who boast about their elevated status on Trump’s White House guest list.

In this regard, Gerson certainly has his head screwed on straight.  Perhaps he learned a lesson or two from his own time of service in the Bush White House.

Gerson was chief speech writer for George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006.  From 2000 to 2006 he was also a White House Senior Policy Analyst and a member of Bush’s White House Iraq Group.

The primary purpose of the WHIG was to advance the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan “to sell” the American public on the imaginary threat of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD program.  In other words, Gerson was on the president’s marketing team charged with candy-coating one of the most catastrophic, illegal, immoral wars in the history of American foreign policy.

Everyone on that team knew exactly what they were doing.

Here is Paul Waldman’s assessment (in a very cogent article published in

This Week) of the work accomplished by Gerson and his associates in the WHIG:

“What the Bush administration launched in 2002 and 2003 may have been the most comprehensive, sophisticated, and misleading campaign of government propaganda in American history.”

That’s what Gerson helped to accomplish.

Gerson is widely regarded as the author of the “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” fear-mongering metaphor that became the most effective rhetorical trick used by Bush officials in promoting the Iraq War.  (Check out Gerson’ Wikipedia page for some interesting anecdotes told by his fellow speech-writers [with citations]).

I have always wondered what happened to Gerson’s Christian conscience during those crucial years in the Bush White House.

In 2012 Gerson gave a public lecture at Calvin College.  I was there.  As he often does, Gerson talked about the formative influences of Charles Colson and Senator Jack Kemp, two Christian leaders with whom he worked closely as a young man.  He credits them for positively shaping his Christian social and political conscience.  He also talked briefly about his years with George W. Bush, but had precious little to say about his work in the White House.

When it came time for the audience to ask questions, I took my place in the short line forming behind a public microphone.  I don’t recall my exact words, but this is essentially what I asked Mr. Gerson:

“You have talked a lot about how your Christian conscience has directed you through your life in politics.  Yet, your political career includes working for an administration that legalized and carried out the torture of other human beings.  Your White House also violated our Constitution with its warrantless, mass surveillance of the American people.  When asked, the president you worked for knowingly lied to us about that fact.

 “How did you, how do you, reconcile all of that with your ‘Christian conscience?’  How could you do that?  What do you have to say?”

Gerson’s answer was a disheartening example of double-speak and evasion.  He never answered my question, not really.  And I was surprised that he didn’t have a more polished response.  Certainly, he had been asked this question before?

I have no idea if Mr. Gerson has ever answered that question within himself.  If he felt ashamed or had experienced any regret over his years of deliberate, knowing collusion in clearing a path for one of the greatest American crimes of the 20^th century, he gave no indication of it.

Though I strongly disagree with almost all of Gerson’s policy positions, I am pleased to see him take up the pen and use his position with the Washington Post to shed some sensible, moral – perhaps even somewhat Christian – daylight onto the sweaty, belching, obnoxious, moral turpitude that is the Trump administration.

Apparently, the water temperature in this current White House is too hot even for Michael Gerson.  But his previous ability to flourish at criminally high temperatures causes me to bite my tongue as others commend him for his Christian cajones.

My understanding of Christianity says that redemption first requires confession of and repentance from sin.  Public sins demand public confession.  We may have learned a little about Gerson’s tolerance of the current heat in Washington, D.C.

I am not convinced that his current opposition to Donald Trump tells us anything at all about Gerson’s Christian discipleship.

I am still waiting to hear a public confession of his past, political sins.