Jennifer Rubin astutely notes that Obama the candidate “let everyone form their own impression of who he is and what he stands for.” (In this respect, he is like one of those alien species from Star Trek with the ability to assume the appearance of whatever life-form it finds itself among.) And Rubin correctly reads Tina Brown as saying that Obama does not believe in the mission in Afghanistan and — at least implicitly — that the Daily Beast editor is calling the president a liar when he claims that his health-care plan will be “deficit neutral.”

Brown’s comments call to mind Christopher Buckley’s odd endorsement, in October 2008, of Obama’s presidential bid, in which Buckley — like a feckless member of the Starship Enterprise crew — failed to see the alien standing in front of him as alien, even to the point of turning over control of the ship to him. In his endorsement, Buckley identified himself as “a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets” and correctly characterized Obama as a “lefty,” raising the obvious question: “So, Chris, why are you endorsing him?” Part of Buckley’s answer concerned his dissatisfaction with John McCain. But beyond that, Buckley opined that Obama had “a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect” and that, therefore, he would “surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.” In other words, Buckley supported Obama because he thought Obama was too smart to do the things he was promising to do; which is to say, he supported him because he didn’t believe him.

Now that President Obama has resorted precisely to the “traditional left-politics” that Buckley was so sure he would eschew, and has deepened the “pit” by several orders of magnitude — with the worst yet to come — we are left to conclude (1) that Obama’s intelligence and temperament fall far short of what so many of his supporters — and some of his adversaries — attributed to him, and/or (2) that Obama was telling the truth about his policy intentions all along and that what is in doubt is the capacity of some of his supporters to recognize an alien when they see one.

Earlier this year, it was reported in the online journal “spiked” that Britain’s energy and climate-change minister, Ed Miliband, joined by the Right Reverend James Jones, bishop of Liverpool, and the Right Reverend Dr. Richard Chartres, bishop of London, issued a statement calling for a “carbon fast” during the then-approaching Lenten season. Evidently, these Guardians of the Faith, having looked deeply into their souls – and the souls of their fellow Brits – felt that the accumulated weight of the sin of “carbon emission” had grown so overwhelming that divine recompense was called for. For his part, Miliband’s sin-offering entailed (among other unspecified sacrifices) abstaining from “driving short distances into town.” Bishop Jones characterized as a “moral imperative” the reduction of carbon consumption by those “who emit more than our fair share of carbon.” To my knowledge, the Right Reverend Jones offered no specific ecclesiastical guidance on how one’s “fair share” of carbon is to be calculated.

It has been quite some time — to the best of my knowledge — since the Church of England has had much to say about the expiation of sin, so the pronouncements of the good bishops of Liverpool and of London may, perhaps, reflect a new conception of sin, viz. environmental sin. It is still an evolving concept, but evidently paths of atonement and expiation are already being blazed by the shepherds of the Church (and, it should be noted, of other churches as well).

In addition to foregoing “short drives,” a more demonstrative — if not environmentally efficacious — ritual is also available to the carbon sinner in the form of “carbon offsets.”  These are modern-day counterparts to the “indulgences” of old that so agitated Martin Luther and legions of those faithful who were to become Protestants. Granted, this form of expiation is available only to the large corporate sinner; the common sinner will — for now — have to make do with more modest measures: rigorous recycling regimens, reusable forms of this-and-that, abstention from meat, switching to cloth diapers, and the like. (This may yet change. Is it too much to hope that the same financial minds who conceived of complex derivative securities might find a way of syndicating carbon offsets, dividing and redividing them into ever smaller chunks and making them available to the average investor-sinner?)

Be that as it may, just knowing that carbon offsets are available and are, as I write, laying up a treasury in heaven against which we — that most accursed of species — may draw on to atone for the original sin of inhabiting this planet and consuming its resources fills me with a sense of awe and renews my appreciation of the magisterial power of simple faith.