The Limited Modified Hangout

Towing the lion since June 2003.

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Aquarius: (Jan. 20—Feb. 18)
You obviously weren't concealing anything, so your new theory is that airport security has it in for naked people.

Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo
WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said....

Monday, November 29, 2004

After the Baptist baptism bus tour
..."The last thing I would want to do is put down what people call the church-growth movement," said Welch. "We've got a lot of fine people doing fine work and we have some fine churches out there that are growing. But I do think that sometimes we forget that just because we have church growth doesn't mean we're growing the church....

...That's why he cares that the number of baptisms has declined in Southern Baptist churches four consecutive years. What is just as disturbing, said Welch, is that the SBC's baptism rate had been parked on a statistical plateau since 1951 -- averaging 384,000 a year while the nation's population boomed....

...The denomination's baptism statistics reveal other sobering truths. After the age of 11, it becomes increasingly difficult to win converts -- even among children in church families. Also, only 40 percent of the adults baptized into Southern Baptist congregations are true converts. The rest were already members of other Christian flocks.

Welch describes this in blunt language: "What that means is that we're not reaching the pagan pool. ... We're just rearranging the furniture inside the church."...

Labels: evilvangelicals

The Costs of Staying the Course
Conditions in Iraq and in Past Wars Cast Casualty Tolls in a Different Light

More than 1,200 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq so far. In the face of rising casualties, polls taken throughout the election season revealed the public's discomfort with our progress in Iraq but gave little indication of weakening support for the mission. This ambivalence about the war's human costs reflects perhaps both a belief in the cause for which our troops are fighting and a perception that in the aggregate their sacrifices -- while always tragic on an individual level -- are historically light. A glance at earlier wars seemingly confirms this latter sentiment. Compared with the more than 405,000 American personnel killed in World War II and the 58,000 killed in Vietnam, Iraq hardly seems like a war at all.

But focusing on how few military deaths we've suffered conceals the difficulty of the mission and the determination of the forces arrayed against the American presence in Iraq. A closer look at these deaths -- 1,232 as I write -- reveals a real rate of manpower attrition that raises questions about our ability to sustain our presence there in the long run....

...On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war.

Moreover, we fought those wars with much larger militaries than we currently field. The United States had 12 million active-duty personnel at the end of World War II and 3.5 million at the height of the Vietnam War, compared with just 1.4 million today. ...

...These figures suggest that our forces in Iraq face a far more serious threat than the public, the media and the political establishment typically acknowledge or understand. Man for man, a soldier or Marine in Iraq faces a mission nearly as difficult as that in Vietnam a generation earlier. ...

NATURE, NURTURE, ETC....
Sacerdote examined various outcomes of Korean children who had been randomly assigned to adoptive families in the U.S. during the 70s, and as the chart on the right shows, he concluded that family income had no effect at all on the eventual earning power of adoptees. Conversely, it had a big effect on biological children. In other words, being raised in a high-earning family doesn't seem to have much effect, while being born to to a high-earning family does....

‘Roe Effect’ Cited as Factor in Election Outcome
While many liberal Democrats fear future Supreme Court appointments could bring an end to legalized abortion, over the long haul it might be in their own best interest, if a Southern Baptist leader is correct.

Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said on National Public Radio that abortion may have been a factor in the recent election--not abortion policy, but abortion practice.

“It is true that married people tend to be people who are socially conservative and tend to be people who vote disproportionately for George Bush and tend not to abort their children but have them,” Land said. “Democrats tend to be disproportionately single and when they are married tend to abort at higher than the national average. That means they don’t reproduce as many children in the next generation.”

Land isn’t the first to come up with the idea. It’s been around for a couple of years and even has a name: the Roe effect, an allusion to the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing most abortions in the United States.

While Republican women also have abortions, demographics suggest that Democrats have them at a rate 30 percent higher. That means—presuming that children inherit the political leanings of their parents—Democrats have lost 6 million more potential voters than Republicans in three decades of legalized abortion.

“Do Democrats realize that millions of Missing Voters—due to the abortion policies they advocate—gave George W. Bush the margin of victory in 2000?” Larry Eastland wrote in an American Spectator column reprinted in June in the Wall Street Journal.

The idea is controversial....

Campolo Says Church Will Suffer for Partisan Politics
The church in America is going to suffer for allowing secular political divisions to enter religion, author and activist Tony Campolo said on a Sunday talk show.

"When the church gets aligned with a political party--left or right--it's like mixing ice cream and horse manure. It won't hurt the manure, but it ruins the ice cream," Campolo said on ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopolous....

...Campolo said evangelical voters helped elect President Bush to a first term four years ago expecting him to overturn Roe vs. Wade, something "he did not make the slightest effort" to do.

"That left me suspicious that the religious right was more concerned about a Republican president than the unborn," Campolo said....

..."As a Christian I know the difference between Jesus Christ and President Bush," Bauer said."I don't think either party has a monopoly on virtue or vice."

Killer Ending
The new Left Behind novel reinforces a trend toward a Jesus who comes not with peace but a sword.

Jesus has been depicted as a lamb and a shepherd, a rock star and a lowly carpenter. In "Glorious Appearing," the climactic twelfth installment in the Left Behind series released this week, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins give us Christ the Destroyer.

Here's the Christ Triumphant speaking as he encounters the army of the Anti-Christ near the ancient city of Petra in Jordan: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and Last, the Beginning and the End, the Almighty." Upon hearing these words, the Anti-Christ's minions fall dead, "simply dropping where they stood, their bodies ripped open, blood pooling in great masses." Later, as the Lord rides his white horse to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the saved sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

This vision of Christ, who eviscerates his human foes and drops them to the desert floor, is fast becoming the Savior for our times. He is Jesus the Warrior, who has gone in and out of fashion for most of the 20th century. "We're looking for a much more martial messiah," says Stephen Prothero, chairman of Boston University's religion department and author of the recently published "American Jesus." "In part, it's a response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq," he says, pointing out that the militant Jesus was popular during and after both world wars. "In the '60s and '70s, this Jesus nearly disappears," says Prothero. "You get the sense now that we are swinging back."

To find further evidence of this shift, you need go no further than the movie theater to take in this year's other multi-million dollar Christian phenomenon, Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Beaten with rods until his torturers are winded from their exertions, Gibson's Jesus rises to his feet with a virile grunt—if you didn't know the movie was in Aramaic, you could swear he mutters "Bring it on." Three days later, we find Jesus sitting, disrobed and staring into middle space, like an athlete in the locker room. Then, still wearing his game face (and, curiously, nothing else), he strides out into Easter morning to the beat of a warlike drum. The tomb is open; so is a major can of whoop-ass.

Jenkins and LaHaye have been spinning the Book of Revelation, the inspiration for their novels, as a tale of payback since the series began in 1990. In the debut, "Left Behind," true Christians were suddenly assumed into heaven while unbelievers either died promptly--say, if their pilot loved Jesus--or were left to deal with the ensuing chaos. For faithful readers of the series, the surprise may not be the bloody outburst, but how brief and measured it is, and how kindly the Jesus of "Glorious Appearing" then turns out to be. As Jenkins's heroes and the other redeemed stream from every corner of the earth, Jesus appears as an enormous, benign presence who can look everyone in the eye at once while whispering individual blessings. Jenkins's model could have been the stern but loving lion Aslan from C.S. Lewis's Narnia series of the 1950s and '60s. (In an interview here, Jenkins says he based it on his early impressions of Christ from Sunday school.)

Prothero believes that it is precisely this Christ, the loving friend, that we are leaving behind. "What's going on now is a kind of withdrawal from the feminine, Victorian Jesus that has been popular with evangelicals" in the past few decades, he says.

Jesus' split personality--swinging from belligerent to gentle within "Glorious Appearing's" 400 pages--is a sign, perhaps, that evangelicals like Jenkins and LaHaye are still in transition between the Jesus the friend and Jesus the general....

Sunday, November 28, 2004

PRESIDENT BUSH 'OUT OF TOUCH' WITH REALITY, HERSH SAYS
Welcome to the world of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, whose remarkable career has been bookended by two of the most shameful events in America's military history: My Lai in Vietnam, a story he broke as a free-lance reporter, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, a story he broke for The New Yorker.

During his 38-year career, Hersh has written eight books, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer and a host of other prizes. His sources serve at the highest levels of many governments, including our own.

In person, Hersh is tall, stooped, rumpled, gray-haired and bespectacled. He speaks rapidly and intensely in a deep voice. Currently touring to "pimp," as he put it, his newest book, "Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib," he spoke last week at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., to a rapt audience of about 900 people. They greeted him with applause; he said, "Thank you, but you'll be less happy once I'm done."

Hersh's message is simple and frightening: "(George W.) Bush is an ideologue, a Utopian," Hersh said. "He wants to clean out the Middle East and install democracy. He doesn't care how many body bags come back home. There's nothing more dangerous than an ideologue who is completely bonkers and no one is going to tell him."

President Bush is committed to perpetual war, Hersh said.

"He risked his presidency on this war," Hersh said. "He could have gotten more votes if he backed off. But he insisted he hasn't made any mistakes."

Hersh has talked privately with many in the military and CIA, including some who have recently resigned. All told him that if the Iraq war had gone "right" - say, if the Americans had been greeted as liberators - our military would have marched "right and left" - to Syria and Iran.

Oil is a big factor in this war, Hersh said, and so is Israel, but to the President it's about ideology: "Whether this man communicates with God, or is on a crusade, or really is a neo-con, or if he thought that his father's not taking Baghdad was a mistake - in any case, I think he is absolutely committed to staying in Iraq to the end." ...

Things fall apart....
Reading the newest Harper's (December issue; not on-line yet, more's the pity). A review by Greg Grandin of Niall Ferguson's Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. According to Grandin, there's quite a price to be paid....

...Just as poverty drove the Irish and Scots into Britain's colonial army, 'illegal immigrants, the jobless,' and 'convicts' could help fill the ranks of Washington's imperial legion." (Apparently Jonathan Swift and Jeremiah were both wrong: poverty is good for sovereigns!). "Ferguson is especially enthusiastic that African Americans might become 'the Celts of the American Empire.' And once he dispense with what here passes for social democracy, he sets his sights on political democracy. Successful empires, Ferguson writes, require 'the resolve of the masters and the consent of the subjects.'"

According to Grandin, Ferguson is the "darling of the American media."...

Silent majority: Boomers & kids
...Indeed, the traditionally religious American — what the press has anointed the faith or moral values voter — may well be in decline. According to NORC's 2000 General Social Survey, only two in 10 Americans born from 1943 onward attend religious services once a week or more, while six in 10 attend infrequently — at most a few times a year — if at all. That's almost the opposite of older Americans, 55 percent of whom attend once a month or more and 36 percent of whom attend once a week or more.

In fact, the fastest-growing group of religious Americans are those who claim no religious identity at all; their number now almost equals the number of people who call themselves Baptists, according to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey. These numbers track with findings by Independent Sector, a group that studies nonprofit trends, which show that the share of Americans giving their time to religious organizations declined from 28.6 percent in 1989 to 22.8 percent in 1998.

It's not that Americans aren't seeking spiritual guidance — they are, and in large numbers. But they're finding it in nontraditional ways. Much has been written about the number of baby boomers who have returned to the religious fold after the turbulence of the '60s and '70s, but as religious scholar Wade Clark Roof has reported in his various books on boomers and religion, many of them are "re-traditionalizing" their faith, elevating individual worship over deference to authority and embracing modern values over outmoded rules.

This yearning for spirituality over religiosity can be seen in the estimated 20 percent of Americans who show interest in New Age ideas, and in the 20 million who take yoga classes, which approaches the number of boomers and younger adults who attend church at least once a week. A generation ago, most Americans believed in moral absolutes, biblical truth and the authority of their religious leaders, but today, the vast majority say that religious morality is a personal matter. And the trend is increasingly in that direction; only the social conservatives think otherwise.

Nervous Democrats who counsel their party to offer a me-too religious moralism fail to grasp that mainstream morality has changed over the last generation. What's different is that most Americans no longer feel comfortable imposing their personal morality on another's private behavior. But that doesn't mean this new majority is any less moral.

For baby boomers and younger people, there's nothing equivocal about their views of right and wrong. These Americans condemn bigotry, intolerance and discrimination. They reject constraints on personal freedom and don't like it when women are not treated as equals. They find pollution objectionable and see nothing moral in imposing religious beliefs on others. They believe a moral upbringing is teaching kids to think for themselves, not to follow another's rules. What they embrace are pluralism, privacy, freedom of choice, diversity and respect for people with different traditions. Perhaps the only thing missing from this new morality is a politician capable of articulating it....

Saturday, November 27, 2004

The Real Significance of the 'Civil War'
Abraham Lincoln and the war he waged against the seceding Southern states continue to divide libertarian opinion. Some libertarians point to Lincoln as the harbinger of big government in America, while others cannot bring themselves to support the cause of the Southern states, so intimately bound up with chattel slavery as they believe it to have been. Although the latter position is often poorly or even dishonestly argued, the objection it raises is not in and of itself foolish or contemptible, and those who advance it in all sincerity are entitled to a fair-minded and non-polemical reply.

Lincoln’s personal opinions about race, the legality (or otherwise) of his actions as president, and the degree to which the war really was a conflict over slavery, are subjects for another time, and indeed are taken up in my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Here we confine ourselves to the more modest task of introducing a useful moral framework for evaluating the significance as well as the rights and wrongs of the conflict.

Many of Lincoln’s admirers have the honesty to admit that when he called up those first 75,000 militiamen in 1861 to put down the "rebellion" in the South, he had no intention of waging a war to abolish slavery. What they argue instead is that as the war progressed the meaning of the Northern war effort evolved in Lincoln’s mind, becoming a war not only for the Union but also for human liberation. The more mystical among them suggest that this had in some sense been the war’s purpose all along, but that it was only gradually that Lincoln himself became aware of the significance of the historical moment into which he had been placed.

But there is no reason that this kind of argument should be raised only on behalf of the Northern cause and not for the Southern. In other words, isn’t it possible that the South’s own self-understanding also evolved over the course of the war? Thus even if some people did believe they had seceded over slavery, is it not possible that they, too, may eventually have begun to appreciate larger issues at stake in the conflict just as Lincoln is said to have done?

Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy at Emory University, has identified one of these larger issues, and it was one that Southerners did indeed appreciate. In the modern age, Livingston observes, we have seen federative polities giving way to modern states. ...

... It is true that the modern state could protect individuals from the oppressions of these smaller authorities. Thus the modern state could end slavery in one fell swoop. But as Livingston points out, it could also carry out great atrocities, of a kind the world had never before seen. State slavery now re-emerged, not only in the form of the Soviet gulag and the Nazi concentration camps, but also in the form of military conscription, a uniquely modern idea. In just four years, nearly three times as many men were killed in World War I as there were slaves in the South. (Its sequel, World War II, took 50 million lives.) Tens of millions would perish in slave labor camps, dwarfing the 11 million slaves brought to the New World (five percent of whom went to North America) in 400 years of the slave trade....

Friday, November 26, 2004

Conservatives Urge Closer Look at Marriage
NEW YORK (AP) - ``Protection of marriage'' is now the watchword for many activists fighting to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying. Some conservatives, however, say marriage in America began unraveling long before the latest gay-rights push and are pleading for a fresh, soul-searching look at the institution.

``When you talk about protecting marriage, you need to talk about divorce,'' said Bryce Christensen, a Southern Utah University professor who writes frequently about family issues.

While Christensen doesn't oppose the campaign to enact state and federal bans on gay marriage, he worries it's distracting from immediate threats to marriage's place in society.

``If those initiatives are part of a broader effort to reaffirm lifetime fidelity in marriage, they're worthwhile,'' he said. ``If they're isolated - if we don't address cohabitation and casual divorce and deliberate childlessness - then I think they're futile and will be brushed aside.'' ...

...``That was the best argument same-sex marriage advocates had: 'Where were you when no-fault divorce went through?''' said Allan Carlson, a conservative scholar who runs a family-studies center in Rockford, Ill....

...For the past fifteen years many Baptists around the country have been sending a tithe of their tithes to the SBC to support missionaries who have dedicated their lives to sharing the gospel around the world. Throughout that time the Fundamentalists have been methodically dismantling the system supporting professional, career missionaries that made our work effective. They've been micromanaging missionaries until they resign in frustration, firing missionaries who could not conscientiously support their bibliolatrous theology, and selling off/closing down the system of schools and hospitals in foreign lands that we created to earn a hearing for the gospel. In place of the former system, the Fundamentalists have created a system designed for short-term evangelistic work by a workforce with rapid turnover. In brief, our mission boards have become a placement center where SBC seminary graduates receive a brief internship before being dumped back into our churches. SBC Seminaries and Mission Boards have become little more than Ferris wheels that indoctrinate our churches in Fundamentalist theology and political ideology.

Missions is the bait that keeps money flowing to the SBC, but the money has been systematically switched to efforts to oil a machine that can control the secular political life of this country. To see this happening, all you have to do is look at the size of the increases for the past fifteen years in the budgets of the SBC's Executive Committee and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Now that this political "Hummer" is up and running, "Boss" Falwell is receiving the keys and will soon be in the driver's seat....

Press Routinely Undercounts U.S. Casualties in Iraq
As the toll of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq in November approaches record levels for one month in this war, is the press only telling part of the story?

The Pentagon's latest official count, provided on Wednesday, listed 1230 American military killed in Iraq and another 9300 U.S. troops wounded in action. How seriously? More than 5000 of them were too badly injured to return to duty. More than 850 troops were reported to have been wounded in action in Falluja so far.

But this only scratches the surface of the total toll.

Earlier this week, CBS’s "60 Minutes" revealed that it had received a letter from the Pentagon declaring: "More than 15,000 troops with so-called 'non-battle' injuries and diseases have been evacuated from Iraq."...

...The total number of casualties is about 25,000, plus the more than 1,200 killed. Since about 300,000 men and women have served in Iraq, it makes for a casualty rate of about 9%.

What Became of Conservatives?
...In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits of no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate...

...Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person’s civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof.

Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.

There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.

American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts’ delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing implications for their country of their reckless doctrines.

Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the US invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."

It is amazing that only a short time ago the Bush administration and its supporters believed that all the US had to do was to appear in Iraq and we would be greeted with flowers. Has there ever been a greater example of delusion? Isn’t this on a par with the Children’s Crusade against the Saracens in the Middle Ages?

Delusion is still the defining characteristic of the Bush administration. We have smashed Fallujah, a city of 300,000, only to discover that the 10,000 US Marines are bogged down in the ruins of the city. If the Marines leave, the "defeated" insurgents will return. ...

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Dead-Check in Falluja
In April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was being toppled in Baghdad, symbolizing the promised liberation of Iraq, I was embedded with a Marine unit engaged in fierce combat about 30 miles north of the city, on the outskirts of Baquba. Late that afternoon, the Humvee I was in was following about 50 feet behind a Marine Light Armored Vehicle when it pulled alongside a Toyota pickup pushed to the side of the road, its doors riddled with bullet holes. The head of at least one occupant was visible in the truck, but I couldn't determine if he was moving or not. Nor did I see any weapons. As our Humvee stopped behind the truck, a Marine in the vehicle ahead of us leapt out, pointed his rifle into the window of the pickup and sprayed it with gunfire. It was a cold-blooded execution.

As we continued forward, passing the truck, I glimpsed at least two corpses sprawled on the seats, the interior spattered with blood. During the brief moment I looked, I was unable to determine whether the dead men possessed weapons. None of the four Marines in our Humvee said anything. We had been awake for more than 30 hours, much of that time under steady mortar, rifle, machine-gun, and rocket-propelled grenade fire from enemy combatants who dressed in civilian clothes and moved around on the battlefield in Toyota pickups. (To make matters even more confusing, during the height of combat farmers were racing into the surrounding fields—where enemy soldiers were shooting at us from dug-in, concealed positions—in order to rescue sheep from the gunfire.)

In the previous few minutes we had already passed more than a dozen corpses strewn by the side of the road. Some had the tops of their heads missing, expertly hit by Marine riflemen. Others were burned—still smoking, actually—having crawled out of other vehicles set ablaze by rockets fired from Marine helicopters. The execution of one or two more men wasn't worth commenting on. ...

...One of the great ironies of the Bush administration, obsessed as it is with Christian values and the attendant crusade to punish what it deems obscene and lewd in the media (from Janet Jackson's breast to Howard Stern's speech), is that it has given us a war in which the airing of snuff films on national TV has become routine. The conflict in Iraq, as seen through news coverage, has begun to resemble the macabre underground 1980s video series Faces of Death. Throw in the images produced by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib, and the administration has put itself in the running to successfully compete with the BDSM side of the porn industry.

Just as I thought I was adjusting to the video carnage, NBC correspondent Kevin Sites, embedded with U.S. forces in Falluja, gave us last week's shocker: the video of a Marine standing over a wounded, apparently unarmed Arab sprawled on the floor of a mosque and executing him with a gunshot to the head. ...

...The Marines constantly debated the morality of what they were engaged in. A sergeant in the platoon told me he had consulted with his priest about killing. The priest had told him it was all right to kill for his government so long as he didn't enjoy it. By the time the unit reached the outskirts of Baghdad, this sergeant was certain he had already killed at least four men. When his battalion commander praised the unit for "slaying dragons" on the way to Baghdad, the sergeant later told his men, "If we did half the shit back home we've done here, we'd be in prison." By then, the sergeant told me, he'd reconsidered what his priest had told him about killing. "Where the fuck did Jesus say it's OK to kill people for your government? Any priest who tells me that has got no credibility."

He and several other Marines recently returned from Iraq (many from their second tours) whom I've talked to about the Falluja shooting say they are not sure they would have dead-checked the wounded man in the mosque had they been in the same position. Most say they probably would have, even though the mosque had already been cleared once. "What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city?" one of them said. "Marines don't shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people."

Another Marine in the unit I followed—a Democrat's dream, he returned home from fighting in Falluja in time to vote for Kerry—added, "Americans celebrate war in their movies. We like to see visions of evil being defeated by good. When the people at home glimpse the reality of war, that it's a bloodbath, they freak out. We are a subculture they created and programmed to fight their wars. You have to become a psycho to kill like we do. To most Marines that guy in the mosque was just someone who didn't get hit in the right place the first time we shot him. I probably would have put a bullet in his brain if I'd been there. If the American public doesn't like the violence of war, maybe before they start the next war they shouldn't rush so much."

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Greetings from Colorado Springs
Hi folks! It turns out that the Focus on the Family Ministry has a “weekend furlough” program, so I have a spare moment to check in on the blog from out here in lovely Colorado Springs. They limit us to half an hour on the Internets, though, because here at Focus on the Family, they like to keep the focus on the family. Actually, our unofficial motto is “it’s the patriarchy, stupid” – but of course I can’t say that in public!

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that there’s no cause for concern about me or my state of mind, and that my hosts are treating me well. Not quite as well as my other conservative hosts back in September– let’s just say there’s a lot less single-malt flowing around these parts– but quite well nonetheless. And before I go back in for Week Two of the program, they’d like me to say a few words to the readers of this most humble blog.

First, you liberals and progressives and leftists and Communists have to stop vilifying “Christians.” It’s counterproductive and wrong. Christians are not responsible for George Bush’s election. Christians are not intolerant; Christians are not ignorant. Christians are actually filled with agape; they work among the poor and the downtrodden, they give up all hope of material gain in this world, they turn the other cheek when they are struck, and they always do unto others as they would have others do unto them.

So you liberals need to distinguish between Christians and CHRISTIANs. Out here in Colorado Springs, we don’t have much use for most of that garden-variety Christianity stuff. Who needs a vow of poverty when you’re trying to establish a media network? Who needs agape when you’re counting down to the Apocalypse? No sir, there aren’t any of those Christians around here.Instead, we prefer to think of ourselves as

Creationists and
Homophobes for a
Righteous
Inquisition of the
Secular
Terrorists who
Infest
America
Now.

In the future, please get that straight and keep it straight. Lay off the Christians– they’re completely innocuous people. When you want to criticize the ascendant religious right, say “CHRISTIANs” or “Creationists and Homophobes” for short. We’ll know who you mean. And then we’ll come and get you. ...

The Elect: God's Second Term"
...I will not be God-whipped. For a start, it is not at all clear that the "values" analysis of George W. Bush's reelection is correct . . . Moreover, the "faith" that is being praised as the road to political salvation, the Bush ideal of religion, is a zealous ignorance, a complacent renunciation of proof and evidence and logic and argument, as if the techniques of reason were merely liberal tools....

...The faith fetish, the belief in belief, is an insult not only to the mind, but also to the soul. For there are many varieties of faith, and the "faith" of the Republicans, which does not grasp the old distinction between fideism and faith, represents only one of those varieties. Not all religion in America is as superstitious and chiliastic and emotional and dogmatic and political as this. And not all religion in America is as Christian as this. When the spokesmen for Bush's holy base call for the restoration of religion to a central position in public life—for the repeal of the grand tradition of mutually beneficial separation that began with Roger Williams's heroic alienation from the theocracy of Massachusetts—they are usually calling for the restoration of their religion....

...The liberal conscience is not a human failing. It is another kind of conscience. It has reasons. It is a thing of principle, not a thing of taste. The religious right complains of liberal condescension, and often properly; but then it condescends to liberalism by reducing it to class or to culture, and by regarding it not as a moral creed but as a moral corruption. The offense that religious conservatives regularly take from secular liberals is a little ridiculous. Why do they care so much about our disapproval? They are also in the business of disapproval. The truth is that this kind of conservatism is sustained by its feeling of victimization. Grievance makes it glad. It allows the right to combine the power of a majority with the pity of a minority....

...The belief in God does not guarantee the knowledge of God's wishes. This is the most elementary lesson of the history of religious faith. The believer lives in the darkness more than he lives in the light. He does not wallow in God's guidance, he thirsts for it. And when God's guidance comes, it does not take the form of policy recommendations, unless he has created his God in the image of his desire. What deity is this, that has opinions about preemption and taxation and Quentin Tarantino? In this regard, there is no more ringing refutation of the religion of George W. Bush than the religion of Abraham Lincoln. "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other," Lincoln proclaimed at the beginning of his second term, and in the middle of a war. "The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully." For Lincoln, his party was not God's party; or rather, the other party was as much God's party as his party was. And he explained this repudiation of human certainty this way: "The Almighty has his own purposes." He did not know what they were, he knew only that they were. Beware the politicians, and the politics, that know more....

Apocalypse (Almost) Now
If America's secular liberals think they have it rough now, just wait till the Second Coming.

The "Left Behind" series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world's Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching."

Gosh, what an uplifting scene!

If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard....

Moderate Pulpits: The Next Target
The interim period is always a vulnerable time for a Baptist church, but it may now be more vulnerable than ever, especially if one of the most vocal leaders of the fundamentalist movement has his way.

“May God lead many of you to some of these moderate churches that deserve fundamentalist pastors like you,” said Jerry Falwell to Southwestern Seminary students on Aug. 24. “Sometimes it takes a full year before that church is who you are,”

Anecdotal stories of “stealth fundamentalists” interviewing for known-moderate churches are abundant. Sometimes these ministers will say whatever it takes to convince a search committee that they are the one to present to the church.

Some say they are tolerant of women deacons, are sympathetic to a democratic rather than authoritarian style of pastoral leadership and that they are willing for persons to support the CBF as well as the SBC in missions giving.

Given a few months in power, however, their story changes. Suddenly they realize that women should be submissive and quiet, that they are the man with the vision for the church that all should follow (or leave), and that the CBF is made up of radical left-wingers....

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

‘With Deepest Sympathy’
Donald Rumsfeld – who’s known as a people-eating systems man – has a long history that shows he prefers technology to humans. Certainly as SecDef he’s always gone for high-tech military gear rather than giving the boots on the ground max priority when it comes to the basics: armored vehicles and vests, sufficient ammo and all the other vital stuff that helps soldiers make it through the Valley of Death.

His beloved shock-and-awe whiz-bang wonder weapons worked well enough initially in Afghanistan and Iraq, but as we saw on the tube last week, we’re once again back to the age-old struggle of man against man – with grunts, not machines, taking and holding ground.

And now, apparently, Rumsfeld’s obsession with machines and their efficiency has translated into his using one to replace his own John Hancock on KIA (killed in action) letters to parents and spouses. Two Pentagon-based colonels, who’ve both insisted on anonymity to protect their careers, have indignantly reported that the SecDef has relinquished this sacred duty to a signature device rather than signing the sad documents himself.

When I went to Jim Turner, a good man saddled with a tough job as one of Rumsfeld’s flacks at the Pentagon, for a confirmation or a denial, he said, “Rumsfeld signs the letters himself.”

I then went to about a dozen next-of-kin of American soldiers KIA in Iraq. Most agreed with the colonels’ accusations and said they’d noticed and been insulted by the machine-driven signature. One father bitterly commented that he thought it was a shame that the SecDef could keep his squash schedule but not find the time to sign his dead son’s letter. Several also felt compelled to tell me that the letter they received from George Bush also looked as though it was not signed personally by the president.

Dr. Ted Smith, whose son Eric was among the first 100 killed in Iraq, notes that the letter he received “from the commander in chief was signed with a thick, green marking pen. I thought it was stamped then and do even now. He had time for golf and the ranch but not enough to sign a decent signature with a pen for his beloved hero soldiers. I was going to send the letter back but did not. I am sorry I didn’t.”

Sue Niederer, whose son Seth was also killed in Iraq, sums it up: “My son wasn’t a person to these people, he was just an entity to play their war game. But where are their children? Not one of them knows how any of us feel, and they obviously aren’t interested in finding out. None of them cares. And Rumsfeld depersonalizing his signature – it’s a slap in the face, don’t you think?”...

Libra: (Sept. 23—Oct. 23)
Take heart: There are people with bigger problems than yours, and acting like you care about them will get you laid.

Christian-Republican alliance: Faustian bargain?
“My pastor kept asking us to pray for George Bush to win,” a Georgia woman told me last week, “and most folks seemed to go along with it. So I just kept quiet and secretly prayed for the other side.”

She’s not alone. A majority of frequent churchgoers may have voted for President Bush (if surveys are right), but a large minority voted for Sen. John Kerry. Not all Christians — not even all evangelicals — are born-again Republicans.

But the word “Christian” (not unlike the word “moral”) is increasingly tied in the news media to the word “Republican,” thanks to the successful alliance between Karl Rove and leaders of the religious right. (In one pre-election news account, a minister described comforting a parishioner who anxiously asked if he could remain a Christian and vote for Kerry.)

Growing numbers of Christians are alarmed by the hijacking of their faith. In an editorial last week, Robert Parham of the moderate Baptist Center for Ethics vowed to “take on the religious right more forcefully — critiquing its false religion and anointment of the GOP as God’s Only Party.”

Meanwhile, emboldened by the perception that evangelicals decided the election, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and other evangelical leaders close to the White House are already lining up to claim the spoils. They expect to have the power to shape the Republican agenda on everything from constitutional amendments to Supreme Court appointments.

But before conservative Christians get too comfortable with this church-state alliance, they would do well to remember a bit of familiar wisdom: Those who seek power by riding the back of the tiger end up inside.

The unprecedented mobilization of evangelical churches by the Republican Party and religious right leaders may have helped win an election, but it could end badly for people of faith in the pews. History teaches that partisan politics inevitably corrupts religion and divides the church....

...Some Christian churches have already tasted the fruits of the Christian-Republican alliance. By executive order, President Bush has opened the floodgates of funding through his “faith-based initiative.” Millions of tax dollars now flow to churches for a whole range of programs — with inadequate First Amendment safeguards to uphold religious liberty.

With government shekels come government shackles. Not only do churches risk losing their autonomy; they risk losing their prophetic voice. A church compromised by partisan politics and dependent on government funds can no longer distance itself from the culture and can no longer call the government to account for its failures.

This threat to religious faith from church-state entanglement is precisely what James Madison warned about during the great battle for disestablishment in Virginia more than 200 years ago. Warning against state support for religion, he argued from history:

“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution....

Our Christian Son-of-a-Bitch
Far from Falluja there's another battle raging that's just as vicious and even more dangerous in its implications. But the American press is for the most part ignoring the civil war in West Africa's Ivory Coast, since it involves nobody, really, just Africans and the French. Which is why Douglas Farah's overview of the conflict in The Washington Post is especially welcome. Farah notes the anti-Muslim fervor of much of the violence -- the homes of Post employees who were Muslim were attacked while police looked on -- and the cynical exploitation of anti-colonialist sentiment by Ivory Coast's president, Lauren Gbago, a thug cut from the same cloth as that of Rwanda's genocidaires. But Farah neglects another aspect of Gbago's strategy: mobilization of evangelical Christian support, in Ivory Coast and abroad.

Gbago has framed the conflict as a holy war, with Ivory Coast "native" Protestants on one side, and foreign Muslims and godless French Catholics on the other. One evangelical preacher took to Ivory Coast state radio to declare that French President Chirac is "inhabited by the spirit of Satan", after French peacekeepers destroyed the Ukrainian gunships Gbago's forces had used to terrorize Muslim civilians and attack the peacekeepers, as well as American aid workers.

Even more disturbing is the support Gbago is finding among American evangelicals. World Evangelical Alliance frames the fight as a "decisive hour" in a battle between Christians and "demonic" Islamists. Mega-site Crosswalk focussed only on Christian victims of violence. And even Christianity Today, home to fine and respectable journalism, spun the story, at its beginning at least, as one primarily of anti-Christian persecution, with no mention that the government in power is "Christian," at least to the extent that such a claim helps it mobilize mobs to attack Muslims. ...

Tomb may shed light on 10th plague
...At the end of a long hallway a human skull rested, propped up in a wooden box, and framed in the bleak light of a bare bulb powered by a generator that rumbled through the stony silence of the tomb.

This skull — Weeks believes, and new scientific evidence suggests — may be that of the oldest son of Rameses II, the pharaoh who most historians agree was the ruler of ancient Egypt more than 3,000 years ago at the time of the biblical story of the Exodus.

If so, this is the skull of a man who the Hebrew Bible says was killed by the 10th of the horrible plagues God sent to convince pharaoh to free the Hebrew slaves. And if so, it contains an important new piece of forensic evidence: The skull has a depressed fracture on the left hand side which pathologists say clearly occurred at the time of death.

In other words, Weeks’s discovery could have profound implications for understanding a biblical narrative that is at the core of Judaism, and part of the foundation of Christianity and Islam. It raises the question as to whether the oldest son of the pharaoh of the Exodus was struck down not by the hand of God, as the Bible says, but by the hand of man. And if that is true, perhaps the 10th plague became a metaphor for the early death that befell the pharaoh’s oldest son....

Moral people must learn how to hate
...I have heard all the arguments repudiating hate. Hatred is evil. It is the cause of all wars. It consumes the soul of he or she who hates. Silly arguments all. Hatred is only evil when it is directed at the good and at the innocent. It is positively Godly when it is directed at cold-blooded killers, motivating us to fight and eradicate them before more people die.

Hatred does not cause wars, it ends them. Because Churchill truly hated Hitler, he inspired a nation to put an end to his blitzkrieg conquests. The French, who did not hate Hitler, collaborated with him, instead. It is indifference to evil, rather than its hatred, that sends a message to the tyrants that they pick on anyone they like for the world will be silent.

He who does not hate Abu Musab al Zarkawi – a monster who shouts "God is great" while sawing off the heads of innocent human beings – is barely human themselves. Can a man love innocent victims without hating their tormentors? Loving victims might generate compassion for their suffering. But hating the perpetrators will generate action to stop their orgy of murder.

Which "moral" man or woman can lay claim to decency if they are not sickened to their stomachs by the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden? Can a moral man have compassion for a dying Yasser Arafat when such love and compassion ought to be reserved exclusively for his victims? While innocence should evoke compassion, evil should evoke only contempt.

Bobby Frank Cherry, the Klansman who killed four black girls in a church bombing in Alabama in 1963, died last week in prison. On my radio show, I expressed my satisfaction that another evil man had perished from the earth. A black caller phoned in disgust. "I used to be like you, Shmuley," he said. "When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, I hated the Klan so much that I wanted to be a sniper and shoot them. But as a Christian, I have worked my whole life to fight that hatred and get it out of my system."

I answered him:

What do you think God would prefer? That you use your energy to fight your hatred, or use your energy to fight evil? Now, no one would sanction your running around and indiscriminately shooting people, because that itself is immoral and illegal. That's not hatred. That's rage.

But it was due to prosecutors' odium for this man that they pursued him for almost 40 years, finally obtaining a conviction and sending him to prison just two years ago. If they had not detested him and his actions, he would have died peacefully at his home and the message would have gone out that you can get away with murder.

Hatred is not necessarily of the devil. Like any emotion, it is neutral, its morality determined solely by the object to which it is directed. ...

Sometimes the message of God gets twisted in the wrong hands
If I've learned one thing over the years it's that we all hold differing views on almost everything. No, not almost everything -- absolutely everything.

Take this. A couple of weeks ago I was stopped by a nice, smiling, inner-peace-loudly-showing couple wanting to know if I planned to see the Rev. Billy Graham's Rose Bowl revival.

Actually, I was. And I don't mean to say that I am somehow superior or that my beliefs trump their beliefs. But you know how some people say that they have "gaydar," the ability to spot gays a mile off? Well, I have "Christiandar."

First, let me say that I am Christian, have been since birth, which provides a wonderful opportunity for the more spiritually realized to ask, "But have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

Anyway, the couple handing me the Billy Graham materials both possessed "Catholicdar," the built-in ability to smell papists a mile off.

Precisely because Catholics of my generation generally don't go around proclaiming their acceptance of Jesus Christ as our personal savior, that's usually the very first thing that comes up with people who want to save us from worshiping plaster statues and such.

Only in this case it was the second thing that came up. When I joked, "It would be nice to see the Rev. Graham while we're all alive," the woman corrected, "You mean, before we are all called home."

If by that she meant heaven or some other well-subscribed-to concept, then we were more or less in agreement. It's the precise wording that gets in the way....

...Still, I could better understand this routine Christian willingness to damn others than I could the people hemmed in by police-erected steel fences outside the stadium on Sunday, the ones with placards reading, "God Hates Fags."

Here's another thing I've learned -- never get into a Bible-quote-throwing contest with anybody who absolutely knows who God hates. Still, I saw a terrible contradiction in the first two words of that statement. But maybe that's just me.

It's unusual, the signs actually disgusted me. How would they make us feel if we substituted any other awful word for our fellow man (you know them all, pick one)? Just because calling someone a fag might be protected by the First Amendment, is that reason enough to do so?

Nearly as disturbing to me, since I had a kid with me, were the stick figures on those same signs picturing one man bending over and another standing directly behind him.

Thank the Lord, my boy is protected from bare breasts on TV. But if he had any doubts about the word fag and a certain kind of sex, it ended with people who came to this revival inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. This is the same bunch that wanted to erect in a Wyoming town where a young gay man was murdered a monument reading, "Matthew Shepard Entered Hell Oct. 12, 1998; age 21 in defiance of God's warning: 'Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination, Leviticus 18:22.' "

Two thousand years after the fact and it comes down to my-way-or-no-way, God Hates Fags and -- this is just my feeling -- Christ in tears.

Christianity Inc.
His image is used to promote cement companies and bakeries, and to sell music CDs, videotapes, T-shirts, hats, mugs, and potato chips. His tours attract corporate sponsors like Federal Express, Mercedes-Benz, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and Pepsi.

We're not talking about Michael Jordan, nor Michael Jackson, nor the reigning pop music or movie idol du jour, but about the brave new world of Pope John Paul II, the world's most desirable product endorser. At a time when for-profit culture industries orchestrate human attention to an unprecedented degree, we now witness a strange kind of institutional overlap where religious groups adopt the latest in advertising and marketing techniques and corporations sell their wares by exploiting deeply treasured religious symbols, images, and stories....

Sunday, November 21, 2004

There is a story in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov about Christ coming back to earth during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. It's called 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor', and in it Christ appears in Seville the day after a hundred heretics have been burned at the stake in a great auto-da-fe. He appears as he did during his lifetime, and the crowds recognise him at once, and he heals the sick. At the steps of the cathedral he meets a funeral procession for a little girl, and he has compassion on the mother and brings the child back to life. Just at that moment the Grand Inquisitor is passing and sees has happened and orders his guards to arrest Christ and throw him into prison. And that night the Grand Inquisitor, an old man who has served the Church throughout his long life, visits Christ in the dungeons and talks to him.

It is in fact a monologue, because Christ remains silent throughout. And the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that he will have him burned at the stake the next day, as the worst of heretics, because he has come back to undo the work of the Church.

The point is that the Grand Inquisitor understands perfectly, well that Christ came originally to offer freedom to mankind: he wanted man's free, unforced love, in place of the ancient rigid law. This lies at the heart of the temptation scene in the desert. If Christ had agreed to turn the stones into bread, he would have had no difficulty in persuading men to follow him - people everywhere would have flocked to him. But Christ rejected that option - he resisted the temptation. He refused to coerce mankind, he didn't want blind obedience: he preferred freedom - without freedom it would all be worthless.

But, says the Grand Inquisitor, that was a mistake. Man doesn't want freedom, he wants simply to be happy; and the only way to make him happy is to deprive him of his freedom. Man's greatest need is to find someone to whom he can hand over this gift of freedom as quickly as possible, and that, says the Grand Inquisitor, is where the Church stepped in. The Church, not Christ, had man's happiness in mind., the Church had the good sense to correct Christ's work, to take away man's freedom, and to give him the bread he asked for. What mankind craves is simply someone to obey.

As I said, throughout this monologue Christ remains silent. When the Grand Inquisitor has finished he waits for a reply - he longs for Christ to say something, however bitter, however terrible. But suddenly Christ gets up and comes over to the old man and softly kisses him on his aged, bloodless lips. That is all his answer. The old man shudders. He goes to the door, opens it, and says to the Prisoner: 'Go, and come no more'. And he lets him out into the dark alleys of the town: the Prisoner goes away.

Now Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is a very good example of what we now call a Fundamentalist. The only uncharacteristic thing about him is that he is fully conscious of the implications of his philosophy: he actually intends to correct Christ's work, to rewrite Christianity Most Fundamentalists persuade themselves that they are imitating Christ, even to the extent of making the farcical allegation that they share his attitude to the infallibility of the Bible. But that apart, the Grand Inquisitor illustrates perfectly the following features of Fundamentalists- a distrust and fear of freedom; a belief in the importance of authority and in controlling what people believe; a corresponding preference for obedience rather than love; a desire to give people what they want rather than the truth: a refusal to allow themselves to be in the least disconcerted when they are confronted with the true nature of their religion; and a readiness to persecute and exclude anyone who is of a different persuasion.

To reduce that to convenient headings, the Fundamentalist is uncomfortable with freedom, truth, and dissent.' and very much at home with authority, obedience, and conformity. But the most striking feature of the Fundamentalist is that, whether he is conscious of it or not, his approach results in the total contradiction of what he professes to believe... (from Peter Cameron's "Fundamentalism and Freedom" (Doubleday; Sydney: 1995. pp. 6-7).

Something's Swishy About Shark Tale
Cartoon Primes Kids with a Pro-Homosexual Message

(AgapePress) - It is an axiom for many parents that, when it comes to teaching kids what they need to know, "It's never too young to start."

What happens when Hollywood applies the same axiom to teaching young people -- even children -- to accept homosexuality?

That appears to be the case in the DreamWorks animated film Shark Tale, released in theaters in October. While it won't take in the money of last year's Disney/Pixar hit Finding Nemo, the DreamWorks story of life under the sea netted almost $119 million in its first 17 days in theaters.

Shark Tale centers on the busy cosmopolitan life of an ocean reef, which resembles, in the words of The Oregonian's Shawn Levy, "Times Square at rush hour." The focus of Shark Tale is primarily on Oscar, a fish who has big dreams of one day striking it rich and living on the top of the reef with the upwardly mobile undersea class.

The reef, however, is frequently terrorized by an organized crime syndicate made up of sharks. The mob is run Mafioso style by a great white shark named Don Lino and his two sons, Frankie and Lenny.

It is when Shark Tale turns its attention to Lenny that it veers toward an undercurrent of approval for homosexuality. While it is difficult to prove intent when a film does not explicitly make a character "gay," the story and dialogue demonstrate an implicit approval of homosexuality....

Friday, November 19, 2004

Peter Bienart has a piece on TNR (available only with a sign in) assailing "evangelicals" for embracing victimhood in the wake of the election:

...But, most of the time, what conservatives call anti-evangelical bigotry is simply harsh criticism of the Christian Right's agenda. Scarborough seized on a recent column by Maureen Dowd, which accused President Bush of "replacing science with religion, and facts with faith," leading America into "another dark age." The Weekly Standard recently pilloried Thomas Friedman for criticizing "Christian fundamentalists" who "promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad," and Howell Raines, for saying the Christian Right wants to enact "theologically based cultural norms."

This isn't bigotry. What these (and most other) liberals are saying is that the Christian Right sees politics through the prism of theology, and there's something dangerous in that. And they're right. It's fine if religion influences your moral values. But, when you make public arguments, you have to ground them--as much as possible--in reason and evidence, things that are accessible to people of different religions, or no religion at all. Otherwise, you can't persuade other people, and they can't persuade you. In a diverse democracy, there must be a common political language, and that language can't be theological.

Sometimes, conservative evangelicals grasp this and find nonreligious justifications for their views. (Christian conservatives sometimes argue that embryonic stem cells hold little scientific promise, or that gay marriage leads to fewer straight ones. On abortion, they sometimes cite medical advances to show that fetuses are more like infants than pro-choicers recognize. Such arguments are accessible to all, and thus permit fruitful debate.) But, since the election, the airwaves have been full of a different kind of argument. What many conservatives are now saying is that, since certain views are part of evangelicals' identity, harshly criticizing those views represents discrimination. It's no different than when some feminists say that, since the right to abortion is a critical part of their identity, opposing abortion disrespects them as women. When George Stephanopoulos asked Dobson to justify his charge that Senator Leahy is an anti-Christian bigot, he replied that the Vermont senator "has been in opposition to most of the things that I believe." In other words, disagree with me and you're a racist. Al Sharpton couldn't have said it better. ...

Letter Threatens Violence Against Presbyterians' 'Anti-Jewish Attitudes'
(CNSNews.com) - Two American Jewish leaders says they are "disgusted and outraged" by threats of violence made against Presbyterian Churches.

In a statement issued Sunday, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, and Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, called the people who made the threats "thugs" who are "far outside the mainstream of American Jewry."

The Presbyterian Church USA recently said it would stop investing in companies that do business with Israel -- an effort, the church says, to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although many Jews see it as an unhelpful, anti-Israel move....

Pastors Across U.S. Disagree on Top Threats to Families
A new study shows that Protestant clergy in America name divorce as the top threat to families in their communities, followed by a wide range of problems from materialism to marital infidelity to negative influences in the media.

Ellison Research conducted the study using a representative sample of 695 pastors from across the nation. The researchers asked pastors to identify the three strongest threats to families in their own communities. In their responses, reported in the November/December 2004 issue of Facts &Trends magazine, 43 percent of the pastors surveyed named divorce as the number-one threat. Meanwhile, 38 percent named negative influences from the media, and 36 percent cited materialism....

Faith-Based Parks?
Creationists meet the Grand Canyon

At a park called Dinosaur Adventure Land, run by creationists near Pensacola, Florida, visitors are informed that man coexisted with dinosaurs. This fantasy accommodates the creationists’ view that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is false. Among the park exhibits is one that illustrates another creationist article of faith. It consists of a long trough filled with sand and fitted at one end with a water spigot. Above the trough is a sign reading “That River Didn’t Make That Canyon.” When visitors open the spigot, the water quickly cuts a gully through the sand, supposedly demonstrating how the Grand Canyon was created, practically overnight, by Noah’s flood. That’s nonsense, of course, but what else would you expect at a creationist park? Certainly, one might think, this couldn’t be acceptable at, say, a National Park, right? Think again.

Two-thirds of the way across the continent, some four million people annually visit Grand Canyon National Park, marveling at the awesome view. In National Park Service (NPS) affiliated bookstores, they can find literature informing them that the great chasm runs for 277 miles along the bed of the Colorado River. It descends more than a mile into the earth, and along one stretch, is some 18 miles wide, its walls displaying impressive layers of limestone, sandstone, shale, schist and granite.

And, oh yes, it was formed about 4,500 years ago, a direct consequence of Noah’s Flood. How’s that? Yes, this is the ill-informed premise of “Grand Canyon, a Different View,” a handsomely-illustrated volume also on sale at the bookstores. It includes the writings of creationists and creation scientists and was compiled by Tom Vail, who with his wife operates Canyon Ministries, conducting creationist-view tours of the canyon. “For years,” Vail explains, “as a Colorado River guide, I told people how the Grand Canyon was formed over the evolutionary time span of millions of years. (Most geologists place the canyon’s age at some six million years). Then I met the Lord. Now I have a different view of the Canyon, which according to a biblical time scale, can’t possibly be more than a few thousand years old.”

Vail’s book attracted little notice when it first appeared in the NPS stores in 2003, until a critical review by Wilfred Elders, a respected University of California geologist, brought it to light and took apart its pseudoscientific claims. That led David Shaver, who heads the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service, to send a memo to headquarters urging that the book be removed from the NPS stores. “It is not based on science,” he wrote, “ but on a specific religious doctrine…and should not have been approved for in NPS affiliated book stores.”

The presidents of The American Geological Institute and six of its member societies also weighed in, expressing their dismay to the Park Service. Noting that the Grand Canyon “provides a remarkable and unique opportunity to educate the public about Earth science,” the scientists urged that, “in fairness to the millions of park visitors, we must clearly distinguish religious from scientific knowledge.” ...

Bush Proposes Faith-Based National Healthcare
“Faithcare” to cover all citizens by ‘06

WASHINGTON – In his weekly radio address to the nation on Saturday, President Bush announced his initiative for federalized faith-based healthcare. In the aftermath of the ‘04 campaign for the White House, Bush sought to alleviate the fears of Americans still facing a shortage in flu vaccinations. “My proposal would completely eliminate the cost of healthcare by replacing doctors, nurses, and lawyers with 100 of the nation’s top intercessory prayer warriors.” ...

The Generals Speak
Seven retired military leaders discuss what has gone wrong in Iraq

The nineteen months since the war in Iraq began, some of the most outspoken critics of President Bush's plan of attack have come from a group that should have been the most supportive: retired senior military leaders. We spoke with a group of generals and admirals that included a former supreme Allied commander and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and they all agreed on one thing: Bush screwed up....

...The parallels between Iraq and Vietnam have been overblown, because we were in Vietnam for a decade and it cost us 58,000 troops. We've been in Iraq for nineteen months and we're still under 1,200 killed. But there is one sense in which the parallel with Vietnam is valid. The American people were told that to win the Cold War we had to win Vietnam. But we now know that Vietnam was not only a diversion from winning the Cold War but probably delayed our winning it and made it cost more to win. Iraq is a diversion to the war on terror in exactly the same way Vietnam was a diversion to the Cold War....

...We screwed up. we were intent on a quick victory with smaller forces, and we felt if we had a military victory everything else would fall in place. We would be viewed not as occupiers but as victors. We would draw down to 30,000 people within the first sixty days.

All of this was sheer nonsense.They thought that once Iraq fell we'd have a similar effect throughout the Middle East and terrorism would evaporate, blah, blah, blah. All of these were terrible assumptions. A State Department study advising otherwise was sent to Rumsfeld, but he threw it in the wastebasket. He overrode the military and was just plain stubborn on numbers. Finally the military said OK, and they totally underestimated the impact the desert had on our equipment and the kind of troops we would need for peacekeeping. They ignored Shinseki. The Marines were advising the same way. But the military can only go so far. Once the civilian leadership decides otherwise, the military is obliged.

There is not a very good answer for what to do next. We've pulled out of several places without achieving our objectives, and every time we predicted the end of Western civilization, which it was not. We left Korea after not achieving anything we wanted to do, and it didn't hurt us very much. We left Vietnam -- took us ten years to come around to doing it -- but we didn't achieve what we wanted. Everyone said it would set back our foreign policy in East Asia for ten years. It set it back about two months. Our allies thought we were crazy to be in Vietnam.

We could have the same thing happen this time in Iraq. If we walk away, we are still the number-one superpower in the world. There will be turmoil in Iraq, and how that will affect our oil supply, I don't know. But the question to ask is: Is what we are achieving in Iraq worth what we're paying? Weighing the good against the bad, we have got to get out.

Bush, the Neocons and Evangelical Christian Fiction
America, "Left Behind"

"Is [Jesus] gonna kill a bunch of people here, like He is over there?"
"I'm afraid He is. If they're working for the Antichrist, they're in serious trouble."
-- Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Glorious Appearing: End of Days

As a professor of comparative religion and cultural studies, I have long been fascinated by the strange intersections between religion, politics and popular culture. One of the most striking such intersections occurred to me this summer as I sat down to read the twelfth and last volume of the wildly popular Left Behind series by evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye and novelist Jerry Jenkins. For those who haven't yet had a chance to read any of LaHaye and Jenkin's series, the story is basically an evangelical interpretation of the Book of Revelation set in the context of contemporary global politics: the Rapture has taken place, the Antichrist has taken control of the U.N. and created a single global economy, while a small group of American-led believers battles the forces of evil in a showdown in Jerusalem.

At the same time that I was immersed in this entertaining mixture of Stephen King-esque thrills and fundamentalist rhetoric, I had also been reading much of the recent literature on the Neoconservative movement and its powerful role in the Bush administration. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke have persuasively argued in their recent study, America Alone, the election of George W. Bush and the confusion following 9/11 allowed a small but radical group of intellectuals to seize the reins of U.S. foreign policy. Led by figures like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the members of the Project for a New American Century, the Neocons have been able to put into effect a long-held plan for asserting a U.S. global hegemony, in large part by dominating the Middle East and its oil resources.

The two narratives that I was reading here -- the Neocon's aggressive foreign policy, centered around the Middle East, and the Christian evangelical story of the immanent return of Christ in the Holy Land-- struck me as weirdly similar and disturbingly parallel. The former openly advocates a "New American Century" and a "benevolent hegemony" of the globe by U.S. power, inaugurated by the invasion of Iraq, while the latter predicts a New Millennium of divine rule ushered in by apocalyptic war, first in Babylon and then in Jerusalem.

I was tempted to dismiss the similarity as an amusing but insignificant coincidence. Yet the more I began to examine the Neocon's strategies and the ties between George W. Bush and the Christian Right, the less this link seemed to be either coincidental or unimportant. I am not, of course, suggesting that there is some kind of conspiratorial plot at work between Neocon strategists and evangelical writers like LaHaye, or that the two are somehow working secretly together behind the scenes. Rather, I am suggesting that there is a subtle but powerful "fit," or what sociologist Max Weber calls an "elective affinity," between the two that has helped them to reinforce one another in very effective ways. The otherwise vacuous figure of George W. Bush represents a crucial link or structural pivot between these two powerful factions, helping to tie them together: Bush presents the Neocons' radical foreign policy in a guise that is acceptable to his large base of support in the Christian Right, even as he reassures his Christian base that their moral agendas (anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, faith-based initiatives, etc) will be given powerful political support. In Bush, America as the benevolent hegemon of the Neocons and the American-led "Tribulation Force" of LaHaye's wildly popular novels come together in a disturbing, yet surprisingly successful way.

In the last two decades, Tim LaHaye has emerged as not only the theological brains behind the best-selling Left Behind series, but also as one of the most influential figures in the American Christian Right. Indeed, when the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals decided to name the most influential evangelical leader of the past 25 years, they chose not Billy Graham, Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, but Tim LaHaye, in large part because of his work in evangelical politics. Not only is LaHaye an influential preacher and interpreter of prophecy and revelation, he has also become a remarkably powerful force in domestic and now even international politics through the highly secretive Council for National Policy, founded in 1981. Called by some "the most powerful conservative group you've never heard of," the CNP includes among its members Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, Oliver North, Christian Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony and, formerly, John Ashcroft (himself a Pentecostal Christian). Recent speakers at the Council's highly private meetings have included Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and Timothy Goeglein, deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. Although the group initially focused primarily on domestic agendas like abortion and homosexuality, LaHaye's Council has recently begun to turn to larger international issues such as U.S. policy in the Middle East and the state of Israel....

...So what are we to make of the strange parallels between this popular series of evangelical fiction and this aggressive Neoconservative strategy for American hegemony? On the one hand, we have the wondrous vision of a New Millennium established after a small American-led group fights against the global forces of the Antichrist in the Holy Land; on the other, we have the bold vision of a New American Century established after American unilateral military force defeats the Axis of Evil and asserts its benevolent hegemony in the Middle East. But how are these two narratives related? Is it a plot hatched secretly in one of LaHaye's Council for National Policy meetings? A coded message woven subliminally into the Left Behind books themselves?

Probably not. Instead, I think this connection is not so much an explicit or even necessarily intentional link, but rather a subtle yet powerful kind of "elective affinity," in Weber's sense of the phrase. As Weber argued in his classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, it is not simply the case that Protestant Christianity caused the rise of early modern capitalism, or vice-versa. Rather, the two shared an affinity that was mutually beneficial and reinforcing. The Protestant ethics of hard-work, thrift, restraint in consumption and asceticism fit well with an early capitalist system based on labor and accumulation of profit and allowed the latter to flourish in ways that no other religious worldview could.

So too, I would suggest, there is a fit or affinity between the evangelical vision of the New Millennium and the Neoconservative ideal of a New American Century. Updating Weber somewhat, we might call this affinity "the Evangelical Ethic and the Spirit of Neo-Imperialism." The Neocons and the Christian Right may not be conspiring together secretly behind the scenes; but they do need each other to promote their respective agendas, and they do have enough similar interests to find common ground in the Prodigal Son, George W. As a relatively empty, unformed "floating signifier," Bush serves as the key link in this elective affinity, the point at which the otherwise conflicting interests of the Neocons and the evangelicals come together in a disturbingly powerful way. ...

Thursday, November 18, 2004

The N-Word & the F-Word
Scrolling down through the threads Tex linked to on FreeRepublic and Little Green Footballs, a thought I've had many times before recurred: liberals have ruined the language. By throwing the words "Nazi" and "fascist" around all these years with reckless abandon, they devalued a portion of our political vocabulary that is desperately needed now. Thanks, liberals, for every time you used the N- or F-word to describe welfare reform, opposition to affirmative action, laissez-faire economics, or the slightest insensitivity. Cos' now, we're looking the real thing right in the face, and the appropriate terms have been sapped of all urgency....

An attack on American tolerance
BACK IN the 1950s, political scientists celebrated America for its "pluralism." That meant people had multiple, cross-cutting identities. Maybe you were a Catholic and also a trade unionist, a sport fisherman, a member of a veterans group, and an engaged PTA parent in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. No single identity absolutely defined you.

Why was this special? Because it created multiple, overlapping communities and prevented the cultural or political absolutism that plagued most societies. It wove tolerance and political suppleness into the fabric of American democracy. People with multiple affiliations could vote for Roosevelt one year and Eisenhower another and not hate neighbors for their party identities.

Indeed, when the philanthropist George Soros set out to undermine communism by stealth in Eastern Europe, he began by subsidizing innocent-seeming voluntary associations of the sort for which Americans are famous in order to quietly break the regime's stranglehold on institutions of all kinds. Imagine the surprise of the commissars when chess clubs turned out to be hotbeds of independent thinking.

America has done this longer, better, and more democratically than any other society, but it is not the only example. In Sarajevo, under both the Turks and later the communists, Muslims, Jews, and Christians enjoyed a cultural coexistence. Under the crumbling Ottoman Empire, diverse ethnic groups lived together without killing each other. And for nearly 300 years in medieval Spain, under history's most liberal Arab regime ever, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony guaranteed by the regime. A citizen could be both a Jew and an Arab and think of himself as Andalusian.

All these societies of tolerance and multiple identity came to grief, and there are dangerous portents that America is heading the same way. If ever most Americans took on monochromatic identities -- evangelical, Republican, and gun-toting conservatives versus abortion-defending, secular, Democratic liberals -- our democracy would be seriously at risk.

The problem is not that America has hardened into red states and blue ones. That vocabulary should be expunged from media shorthand, because it makes a distressing trend seem far more rigid than it is.

In fact, there are rational secular liberals in Texas and religious fundamentalists in Boston. More important, most people who worship God are not yet intolerant of people who worship in different ways or not at all.

The problem, rather, is first, that religious fundamentalists have lately become more absolutist and more insistent. For centuries in the United States (which, after all, was founded on the principle of religious pluralism and tolerance) religion was mostly a personal affair. Keeping religion out of the American Constitution was the triumph of reason over absolutism, and it made America safe for a wide diversity of creeds.

For millennia, faith and reason have co-existed uneasily. They skirmished as far back as the Middle Ages, when Christian theologians nervously contemplated the rediscovery of Aristotle, and later when Galileo was condemned as a heretic. But in most of the West, reason won.

In Europe, religion remains a source of personal comfort, community bonding, and association with cherished traditions. But organized religion no longer rules. Regular church attendance is low, women in Catholic Italy and Spain divorce, use contraceptives, and sometimes have abortions; and the idea that dogma should override science on something like stem-cell research or AIDS prevention strikes most Europeans as bizarre.

In the United States, meanwhile, reason is on the defensive as we head backward toward creationism and religious absolutism. This is one of those moments when people all over the world, threatened by cultural and economic assaults far beyond their local control, are turning to fundamentalisms. Author Ben Barber sums it up in three words: Jihad vs. McWorld.

What is uniquely alarming in the United States today, among all the democracies and in our own history, is that a president of the United States is explicitly on the side of antimodernism. Never before has an American chief executive worked deliberately to foment a fundamentalist absolutism that is ultimately tribal, theocratic, antiscientific, and incompatible with pluralist democracy....

Strong States' Rights Not Likely Key to Left, Right Unity
...Just a few weeks ago, on the National Review Web site, conservative author David Frum wrote that “nearly all conservatives” support Medicaid and Medicare, two of the three largest programs the federal government runs. Not only that, but Frum recommended a tax on high-calorie foods to encourage American consumers to make better decisions about what they eat — the very kind of social engineering conservatives have long opposed.

However, committed states-righters and libertarians can take heart. Apparently, federalism is not dead. The left, long proponents of big, activist federal government, finding itself unquestionably in the minority, is discovering the virtues of federalism. Facing what could be the lengthy reign of a conservative government, many blue-staters are thinking hard about the advantages of local rule.

Liberal Swarthmore historian Timothy Burke wrote on his blog shortly after the election:

[I]t is a shocking thing to wake up the next morning and feel that one is really the target of hatred, to recognize that one's country is now in the hands of people who hate you, disrespect you, and intend to leave little room for you to live the life you prefer on the terms you prefer to live it …

Burke then suggested that the left abandon the idea of an influential federal government that dictates top-down policy for the entire country in favor of allowing blue-state jurisdictions to live by blue-state policy and red-state jurisdictions to live by red-state policy.

He isn't alone. University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole suggested on his Web site that the best way for Democrats to defuse hot-button cultural issues such as gay marriage is to privatize the institution, a position long held by libertarians.

Crooked Timber's Belle Waring went a step further, openly courting libertarians to join a coalition with the left. Salon and The Nation have also run pieces entertaining a left-side embrace of states' rights.

Principled federalists such as Tech Central Station's Nick Schulz (writing for FOXNews.com), Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, the New York Post's Ryan Sager and George Mason University's Don Boudreaux have correctly welcomed such sentiment.

The left's newfound interest in local rule, while baldly self-interested, is heartening. Even the most oppressive of public policies are tolerable if the people subjected to them are free to move to cities or states whose laws are more in line with their beliefs. The idea, to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, is to have 50 “laboratories of democracy” at the state level, and hundreds more at the municipal level, each setting its own laws, each competing for citizens and taxpayers.

But while the left's flirtation with federalism is encouraging, there's also plenty of room for skepticism. The political right once professed allegiance to federalism — until they started winning elections. Now, after decades of wanting to be left alone, the right intends to use its power to impose its values on the rest of country. And now, after decades of trying to foist one-size-fits-all policy onto the rest of the country in nearly every facet of life — from gun control to labor and environmental policy to driving laws to education — the left, now out of power, simply want to be left alone.

Neither is all that surprising. Most people think everyone else should live they way they do. And at the same time, most people resent being told how to live....

TAYLOR: Death is result of debate about God
A Taylor police dispatcher took the call at precisely 12:44 p.m. on Oct. 18.

A 49-year-old man said he'd just blasted a man with a revolver and a shotgun because the man said he didn't believe in God.

The dispatcher said the alleged shooter told him he'd just shot "the devil himself" and was still armed and standing over the body of the 62-year-old victim "in case he moved."

"I want to make sure he's gone," the alleged shooter told the dispatcher.

The dispatcher asked the suspect how many times he shot the victim.

"Hopefully enough," was the suspect's chilling reply, according to the dispatcher.

When police arrived in the 15600 block of McGuire, they could see the victim seated on a living room couch with major trauma to his head, officers said.

They said they were certain he was dead. He was.

Lying on a hallway floor was a black 12-gauge shotgun. Two spent shotgun shells lay on the floor nearby.

Later, police found a revolver with five spent cartridge casings.

On the way to the police station, the suspect told police "he did not want to deal with anyone that did not believe in God," according to the report.

The report also indicated that the suspect and the victim knew each other, although their relationship was unclear.

The suspect said he was an Eagle Scout, the report said.

The suspect said the victim had told him there was nothing he could say that would convince the 62-year-old to believe in God.

Following this discussion, the suspect said, he went into another room and removed his shirt. Then he shaved his face.

He tried once more to convince the victim to believe in God, but this time, he had the shotgun.

"How long would it take you to believe in God?" the suspect said he asked the victim.

"Not until I hear Gabriel blow his horn," the victim allegedly replied, while tipping his hat.

That's when the suspect shot him.

"I did it because he is evil; he was not a believer," the suspect told police.

The suspect said the victim "has been locked up most of his life."

Michigan Department of Corrections records indicate the victim was on probation for a drug conviction.

At the police station, the suspect commented that he believed there is a God.

Then, looking at the floor, he seemed to have second thoughts: "Maybe there's not," he said.

Dear Liberal Friend
I feel your pain. You just suffered through an election in which your side lost and a politician you despise was returned to the White House at the head of a triumphant band of congressional allies. Now you fear that the "enemy" administration will use the power of the state to shove its alien values down your throat.

Of course I sympathize. As a libertarian, I've spent all my life suffering through disappointing election returns. Each turn of the political wheel brings new laws and bureaucracies that exist to impose values on me that I utterly reject. The difference between me and you is that I never have high hopes on election eve, so I feel resignation instead of despair. Oh. Another difference is that some of the alien values shoved down my throat in the past were yours. Whoops! I guess now you know how it feels.

But what's all this talk about emigration and secession? Are you really so distraught that you want to leave the country and (maybe) take some of the geography with you?

Well, you know that I'm sympathetic; I've discussed such options myself. I suppose it's unfeeling of me to mention that folks like you once vocally hoped the IRS would hunt people like me to the ends of the Earth when we pondered escaping to a less kleptocratic jurisdiction, and you unkindly suggested that "Appomatox settled all that" when we fantasized about raising our own flag over a friendly locale. That's in the past. Let's let bygones be bygones. ...

...Now, as for this new-found secessionist sentiment of yours and this talk of a looming civil war between progressive blue states and reactionary red states ...

Ummm ... are you sure you're up to it? Oh I know that the blue states have big universities and successful businesses and a vibrant culture -- wasn't I the one who turned you on to that great Ethiopian restaurant before I moved away? But, believe it or not, red states have businesses, colleges and culture too, as well as something that you don't have and that you're going to need if you're serious about this brother-against-brother stuff: guns.

It was all well and good when your side was running the show to sniff at the Second Amendment and say that the government should have a monopoly on force. You insisted that any talk of resisting the powers-that-be was just SO reactionary (you DO remember our little chat after the Waco unpleasantness, don't you?). But the world looks a little bit different when the cops work for the opposition, doesn't it? If you plan to redraw national borders, you're going to want something of a heavier caliber than those sharply worded e-mails you've been circulating. Frankly, the other side is heavily armed; you're not. ...

...So here's the deal: If you agree to let me live my own life according to my own values, so long as I don't trample on your rights, I'll agree to do the same by you. Think about it; if we all lived according to that sort of understanding, the stakes would be an awful lot lower when your side lost an election. Then you could go about your business without taking time out to chat with immigration lawyers or draw maps with creative new borders on them.

There's no rush; George W. Bush will be in office for four more years. That's plenty of time to consider the potential benefits of a society in which people live and let live, instead of treating each election as an opportunity break the other side to their will.

Tribal Warfare in America
A 30-year-old book by a progressive journalist finds that the passions of reformers can sometimes betray a contempt for the common sense of ordinary people. Sound familiar?

In the fall of 1974, in Kanawha County, W. Va., Christian fundamentalists enraged at the imposition of "blasphemous" textbooks in the public schools demolished a wing of a school board building with fifteen sticks of dynamite. When the board insisted on keeping the books in the curriculum, homes were bombed and school buses shot at. "Jesus Wouldn't Have Read Them," read one of the slogans of a movement whose leader, a preacher, would soon face charges of conspiracy to bomb two elementary schools.

Into this whirlwind stepped Paul Cowan, a shaggy-haired, bespectacled, left-wing New York Jew, trying to make sense of why he felt sympathy for the side that was laying the dynamite....

...The people responsible for the textbooks were bureaucrats who wrote blithely of pedagogy's power to "induce changes ... in the behavior of the 'culturally lost' of Appalachia," and identified teachers as state-designated "change agents" and schools as "the experimental center, and the core of this design." Nowadays the arrogance of this formulation is as grating to us as a chalkboard screech. Not then. It was an era when the language of universally applicable liberal enlightenment flew trippingly off cosmopolitan tongues. Which was why it came as such a shock when the "culturally lost" proved to have ideas of their own – that their culture had inherent dignity and value, and that textbooks suggesting that Christian revelation was on a par with Greek myth were, as protesters put it, "moral genocide."

It took a keen eye and an open mind to recognize that the cosmopolitans were pursuing a form of class warfare. Cowan noticed how urban and suburban professionals in Kanawha County – "Hillers," in local parlance – spoke nervously in private of how familiarity with names like Mailer and Baldwin would get their precious darlings into Harvard and keep them out of West Virginia Tech. The Hillers weren't about to risk having their upward climb impeded by the "Creekers," poor residents in the hollows who wanted "to protest corruption," as one suburbanite told Cowan, but didn't "even know how to spell that word." But some Creekers were motivated by similar dreams of upward mobility. Their version of it was just incompatible with the Hillers' impositions – like the kid who told Cowan "he wanted to go to West Virginia Tech, to be an engineer," and he felt he needed "a good basic education" to do it.

Dynamite wasn't the answer. But neither was a kind of cultural imperialism indifferent to the fact that 81 percent of the district opposed the textbooks. It was, in a word, complicated. Certainly more complicated than the portraits other journalists were creating for sneering consumption back home: death threats, double-barreled shotguns, Onward Christian Soldiers. The futile last stand of yokels against the inevitable march of progress.

It was at a time when, certainly to the left, local cultures were of keenest interest as obstacles federal judges eradicated in order to deliver social justice. But what Paul Cowan understood long before anyone else was that there was a new kind of story to tell about such conflicts: that attempts to "coax people into the melting pot" had costs as well as benefits, and campaigns to replace "our periods with your question marks," as one Creeker put it with aphoristic intelligence, must not simply be imposed by fiat. Cowan understood how "often, people I might once have written off as reactionaries were fighting to preserve their culture and their psychological and physical turf," and that this new argument over the meaning of democracy was defining the next frontier of political conflict itself. That America had tribes, and that sometimes – often – they would come to blows.

We call those fights the "culture wars" now, and we have a more richly variegated vocabulary to describe the Hillers and the Creekers: red state and blue state. Redneck and yuppie. New Class and white working class. "Evangelical" and "liberal." We describe our nation's dueling dreads over such concepts with a casualness that once marked cocktail party chatter about the inevitability of consensus liberalism. Writing in the 1970s, however, Cowan had no such clichés to lean on. He had to figure it out for himself. He did so brilliantly – eyes open, with a courage I can scarcely believe. He traveled all over the country: to Boston during the busing wars; to Forest Hills, Queens, where he was shocked at the racism of immigrant Jews fighting the construction of a low-income housing project; to the southernmost border of the United States, where the sacrifices Mexicans were making to preserve their families looked like anarchy to the Americans patrolling the border with shotguns. Cowan's reporting from these places left him "with a profound respect for the stability of religion, of ceremony, of family life: of customs I'd once regarded as old-fashioned and bourgeois." His travels also found him realizing that "those same longings, translated into political terms, have produced the vicious fights I've witnessed for the past seven years and recorded in this book." His agonized sensitivity to battlefields then barely emergent makes for one of the most remarkable books I have ever read by any journalist....

Why Iraq Will End as Vietnam Did
As Shakespeare once wrote, they have their exits and their entries. Between about 1975 and 1990, following the US defeat in Vietnam, military history was extremely popular among the US Armed Forces. After 1991, largely as a result of what many people considered the “stellar” performance of those Forces against Saddam Hussein, it went out of fashion; after all, if we were able to do that well there was not much point in studying the mistakes our predecessors made. Now that comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq have suddenly become very fashionable indeed, history is rushing right back at us. Here, I wish to address the differences and the similarities between the two wars by describing Vietnam as it was experienced by one man, Moshe Dayan....

...Some people claim that the US won the War in Vietnam, to which I can only say that I strongly disagree. Others argue that Vietnam differed from Iraq, saying that it was essentially a conventional war that was lost because the American civilian leadership failed to provide its Armed Forces with proper strategic direction. It is of course true that there are considerable differences between the two. Still, recalling Dayan’s observations, I think there are three main reasons why the similarities are more important.

First, according to Dayan, the most important operational problem the US Forces were facing was intelligence, in other words the inability to distinguish the enemy from either the physical surroundings or the civilian population. Had intelligence been available then their enormous superiority in every kind of military hardware would have enabled them to win the War easily enough. In its absence, most of the blows they delivered – including no fewer than six million tons of bombs dropped – hit empty air. All they did was make the enemy disperse and merge into the civilian population, thus making it even harder to find him. Worst of all, lack of accurate intelligence meant that the Americans kept hitting noncombatants by mistake. They thus drove huge segments of the population straight into the arms of the Viet Cong; nothing is more conducive to hatred than the sight of relatives and friends being killed.

Second, as Dayan saw clearly enough, the campaign for hearts and minds did not work. Many of the figures being published about the progress it was making turned out to be bogus, designed to set the minds of the folks at home at rest. In other cases any progress laboriously made over a period of months was undone in a matter of minutes as the Viet Cong attacked, destroying property and killing “collaborators.” Above all, the idea that the Vietnamese people wanted to become Americanized was an illusion. All the vast majority really wanted was to be left alone and get on with their lives.

The third and most important reason why I think Vietnam is relevant to the situation in Iraq is because the Americans found themselves in the unfortunate position where they were beating down on the weak. To quote Dayan: “any comparison between the two armies… was astonishing. On the one hand there was the American Army, complete with helicopters, an air force, armor, electronic communications, artillery, and mind-boggling riches; to say nothing of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, and equipment of all kinds. On the other there were the [North Vietnamese troops] who had been walking on foot for four months, carrying some artillery rounds on their backs and using a tin spoon to eat a little ground rice from a tin plate.”

That, of course, was precisely the problem. In private life, an adult who keeps beating down on a five year old – even such a one as originally attacked him with a knife – will be perceived as committing a crime; therefore he will lose the support of bystanders and end up by being arrested, tried and convicted. In international life, an armed force that keeps beating down on a weaker opponent will be seen as committing a series of crimes; therefore it will end up by losing the support of its allies, its own people, and its own troops. Depending on the quality of the forces – whether they are draftees or professionals, the effectiveness of the propaganda machine, the nature of the political process, and so on – things may happen quickly or take a long time to mature. However, the outcome is always the same. He (or she) who does not understand this does not understand anything about war; or, indeed, human nature.

In other words, he who fights against the weak – and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed – and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last US troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters’ skids.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Free Republic Satire

Freepers promote the New American Values
The God-fearing patriotic folks at the Free Republic have come to the defense of the heroic Marine who executed the wounded, defenseless man in a Fallujah house of worship. They've identified the real criminal in the affair, the reporter, Kevin Sites.

Can the Pentagon charge Kevin Sites?

Was not the reporter under the duty to hand over this tape to military authorities,under the rules of imbeds? If that's the case then strong measures should be taken against Sites.
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I sincerely hope... But I'd rather the Marines dish out the justice.
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Turn Sites over to the terrorist.
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That tape should have gone to DOD for vetting first!!
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No need for anything overt. Unfortunate things happen in combat zones, and if the reporter fails to hear someone yell "Sniper!!", well, c'est la guerre.
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The US attorney general may be able to charge him with sedition.
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Someone should've deserted him right before sunset in Fallujah, or some such treatment.
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I wish. This guy Sites shouldn't walk away from this unscathed. Red America wants justice.
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If the government won't police the press there will come a day when the people will.
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It better charge Sites, that treasonous bastard!

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Michael Savage is on fire over this issue.
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He's an effin traitor. He is aiding the enemy. He should be tried and killed.
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He sure behaved like a Judas didn't he? He certainly is doing the leg work for our Islamofascist enemies
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Kevin Sites is a traitor. He shouldn't be allowed to get away with this
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The Constitution was written for the common man and for Christian's sense of Justice. Common law represents God's law. American Justice may seem rough and crude to you, but it is based on godly liberties. Sites is in a WAR ZONE. He has aided the enemy. If he cared about what was going he should have ran back to the brass...not to MSNBC. He's either looking for a pulitzer or he's effin traitor. Either way...he's done.

American Heroes...
I'm feeling sick- literally. I can't get the video Al-Jazeera played out of my head

...What was I supposed to tell them?" He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daughters to help their grandmother in the kitchen. "What am I supposed to tell them- 'Yes darling, they killed him- the Americans killed a wounded man; they are occupying our country, killing people and we are sitting here eating, drinking and watching tv'?" He shook his head, "How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?"

They killed a wounded man. It's hard to believe. They killed a man who was completely helpless- like he was some sort of diseased animal. I had read the articles and heard the stories of this happening before- wounded civilians being thrown on the side of the road or shot in cold blood- but to see it happening on television is something else- it makes me crazy with anger.

And what will happen now? A criminal investigation against a single Marine who did the shooting? Just like what happened with the Abu Ghraib atrocities? A couple of people will be blamed and the whole thing will be buried under the rubble of idiotic military psychologists, defense analysts, Pentagon officials and spokespeople and it will be forgotten. In the end, all anyone will remember is that a single Marine shot and killed a single Iraqi 'insurgent' and it won't matter anymore.

It's typical American technique- every single atrocity is lost and covered up by blaming a specific person and getting it over with. What people don't understand is that the whole military is infested with these psychopaths. In this last year we've seen murderers, torturers and xenophobes running around in tanks and guns. I don't care what does it: I don't care if it's the tension, the fear, the 'enemy'… it's murder. We are occupied by murderers. We're under the same pressure, as Iraqis, except that we weren't trained for this situation, and yet we're all expected to be benevolent and understanding and, above all, grateful. I'm feeling sick, depressed and frightened. I don't know what to say anymore… they aren't humans and they don't deserve any compassion.

So why is the world so obsessed with beheadings? How is this so very different? The difference is that the people who are doing the beheadings are extremists… the people slaughtering Iraqis- torturing in prisons and shooting wounded prisoners- are "American Heroes". Congratulations, you must be so proud of yourselves today.

The genius of you Americans is that you never make any clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves that leave us scratching our heads wondering if we might possibly have missed something.
-- Gamel Abdel Nasser

An Open Letter to Jim Wallis and the Sojourners Movement
...I must say that I could not agree more with what you have written – and wish only that you agreed with it, too. Yes, you are speaking about the prisoners at Guantanamo and men like Jose Padilla, who are basically being held incommunicado without being charged with anything. But you are not alone in your denunciations of these acts of government lawlessness; both James Bovard and Jacob Hornberger have written eloquent – and intellectually consistent – articles on this same subject and, unlike what I read in Sojourners, they do so while demonstrating that the all-powerful state is the culprit behind these acts.

There is a real difference between what Bovard and Hornberger write and what you put in Sojourners, however. You may write about the rule of law, but you do not believe it, or, to put it another way, you want rule of law for people like Padilla, but not for the Martha Stewarts of this world.

A few years ago, in the wake of the Enron scandals, you had a field day. The problem, you wrote, was the lack of government regulation, as though the securities industry were a laissez-faire wonderland. You were in your element, since the central theme of Sojourners from day one (including the days when you were in Chicago and called your publication Post-American) has been anti-capitalism. When Janet Jackson bared her breast during the 2004 Super Bowl, you immediately blamed capitalism; when refugees were fleeing Vietnam in the late 1970s, many perishing in the open seas, you blamed capitalism and condemned the refugees for leaving and declared that they were nothing more than "consumerists" who were "in search of a fix." You said those words; I have not put them into your mouth.

You see, I agree with your assessment of what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq, and with your call for rule of law. However, where were you when the government was passing laws that criminalized free speech (McCain-Feingold) and eviscerated the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments of the U.S. Constitution (Sarbanes-Oxley)? When McCain-Feingold passed, Scott Harshbarger wrote in your publication: "Passage is a triumph of faith in our democracy, our government by the people. We all showed we can win a fight, even against the concentrated power of great wealth."

(By the way, Harshbarger was a prosecutor in Massachusetts and gained fame by his wrongful and malicious prosecutions of people falsely accused of sexually molesting children. Harvey Silverglate, who is a friend of liberty was involved with some of those cases; you may want to contact him to hear what he has to say about Mr. Harshbarger. I can give you his email and his website address if you would like. Mr. Harshbarger apparently does not believe in rule of law, so you can understand why I become suspicious when you give a man like that space in your publication.)

Yes, McCain-Feingold managed to impose the rule of the impervious state over the rule of law, and you treated it as a triumph of theological Truth. And what about your reaction to the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley? Since you claim to champion the rule of law, I would suspect that you would have seen through this as a scheme to destroy rule of law.

Oh, sorry, I was mistaken. In reaction to that law and its anti-Constitutional components, you declared: "Amen to that. Corporate CEOs, no less than everyone else, have a responsibility to the common good, not just to the bottom line." To put it another way, this goes along with your theme (and I must admit you have been consistent) that the law needs to apply one way to the wealthy and another way to the poor. Since you are fond of quoting the Bible, perhaps you should remind your readers of the truths found in Leviticus 19:15. Yes, I know you probably don’t like that verse; it says that one should neither defer to the rich nor the poor, but rather justice should operate on one standard....

...I remember when Jesse Jackson, a U.S. Presidential candidate in 1984, released his tax returns. It seems that in 1983, he and his wife earned about $115,000 of income – and gave $500 to churches and charity. In other words, the Jacksons were not willing to give of themselves in dealing with the needs of others, deferring to the welfare state instead. I make this point because you openly endorsed Jackson that year.

Of course, there is John Kerry. Yes, in the name of Christ, you basically served as a political operative for the Kerry campaign, yet I find it amusing that you were able to find a way to package your radical politics into the candidacy of an extremely wealthy person. It is interesting how you have used your pages to condemn people who started from near nothing and built large business enterprises. Remember your attacks on the founders of Amway? Yes, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel are wealthy men who also claim to confess Christ; that was unacceptable, you wrote, as the Bible says people should not amass great wealth.

Yet, Kerry lives on millions and millions of dollars that other people earned, being that all of his wealth either comes from inheritance or from his current spouse and ex-wife. He and Mrs. Kerry own five mansions and a personal jet, and live lives of unimaginable luxury. Yet, according to you, he was an advocate for the poor and someone we should emulate. No, you are not a prophet, just a political operative....

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

The Pharisees line up to cast their stones at gay partners
This past Tuesday in Jacksonville, the Florida Baptist Convention voted to support a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The Baptists want the Florida Constitution to state that marriage is "the union between a man and a woman and is the God-ordained building block of the family and the bedrock of society."

"The church is the voice of morality," declared the sponsor of this resolution, the Rev. Jay Dennis of Lakeland.

The voice of morality!

I have no quarrel with the Baptists being the voice of morality, even though I was raised a Methodist. (Actually, a Wesleyan - so see, I already know how this whole thing is gonna turn out anyway.)

My only question is:

Why just this morality?

Why just this sin?

Why is this now the moral crisis that deserves to be singled out in our Constitution, the civil law of Caesar, so we can create a lesser class of citizens who don't have the same rights of civil contract?

Could it be because this is an alleged "sin" that only Those Kind of People commit, instead of equally serious sins that Decent People (even Baptists) commit every day?

If we are going to start ranking the "sins," marriage between two gay people who love each other and seek a lifelong commitment doesn't even make the Bible's best-known top-10 list.

Sure, homosexuality is called an "abomination." The Bible says so, not too far from where the Bible also says it's okay to stone your headstrong son to death, and that you'd better stay away from menstruating women.

And yes, the topic of homosexuality really freaked out St. Paul, no question. But so did a lot of stuff.

On the other hand, you know what IS right smack in the Ten Commandments?

Adultery.

Adultery! Now, that's a threat to the institution of marriage. You bet.

Half of heterosexual marriages in our society end in divorce. We heterosexuals are doing a lousy job of "defending" marriage. Adultery is a big part of the reason.

So if we're going to rewrite our Constitution to "protect" marriage from sin because it is the "God-ordained bedrock of society," then I would think that adultery would be a much better target.

The Florida Constitution should be amended to say that there can be no marriage licenses for anyone who has ever had sex outside marriage....

Culture Warrior: Infiltrating the TNPG
I have a family member, an older cousin, who is a (once-fearsome) born again evangelical in a very over-the-top Southern Baptist Conference connected church who is becoming quietly estranged from the movement. He and his family have had social problems within the church for the last few years over money (he has a bunch of kids, 9/11 wrecked the tourism dollar here for two years solid, and he just doens't have money anymore), and it has been humiliating for them, so the family let me in on the backstories and who was safe to talk to and who wasn't in their church. This past election has turned a part time curiousity into a passionate quest, but I believe its time we started fighting this culture war with weapons and insights gathered on their turf. I know that, to some extent, the left has been in the dark previously, but I am not going to surrender to that darkness, I went and got myself a flashlight and 'went digging', and "they" are all a lot more vulnerable to counterattack that I think we have been aware of....

Empires as Ages of Religious Ignorance
“God’s blessing is on him [George W. Bush]. It’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor.”
—Pat Robertson, evangelist

Especially now with the U.S. election results, many pundits appear rather taken aback by the increasing evidence of George W. Bush’s “faith-based” presidency—his “true-believer” confidence that if you just “believe,” all things are possible. Those who have this faith believe they can transcend the reality that circumscribes the actions of those who lack such belief.

In his October 17th New York Times article, “Without a Doubt,” Ron Suskind recounts a conversation with a senior Bush adviser in the summer of 2002, who noted that people such as Suskind were “in what we call the reality-based community.” When Suskind attempted a reply, the adviser replied: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. . . . We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This “arrogance of power” is right out of the imperial doctrine of Theodore Roosevelt, which was once called “pure act,” or in a larger sense, the “action principle” of fascism. Clearly, any empire’s administration believes that it is not constrained by the reality of the same “Law” that applies to the rest of society.

But, what is perhaps most significant in the events recounted by Suskind and in the election results is not President Bush’s confident, unquestioning faith that he is “God’s instrument,” but the blind faith of his fundamentalist followers, reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis’s descriptions in Elmer Gantry. As Suskind somewhat differently observes, one might say that George W. Bush went up the hill as a tolerant Methodist, and came down as a puritanical Calvinist.

What is less understood is that all of the great empires in history have been characterized by a decline of reason and an increase in super-naturalist faith, combined with a belief in the empire with the emperor holding God’s “mandate” on earth.

There are only three ultimate sources upon which derivative values such as “equality” can be based: supernatural law, natural law and statist, positive law. Empires tend to combine all of the three so that the emperor’s legitimacy flows from God, nature, and his position as head of State. The intertwining of religion and nationalism in the State is indeed a very powerful one.

Today’s unflinching, fundamentalist Christian support for the war in Iraq and U.S. global interventionism (regardless of the facts) was foretold earlier by anti-rational evangelical attempts to control textbooks, deny evolutionary principles, and block scientific research—sure early signs of the rise of a new “Age of Empire.” The most famous book-burning incidentally was not pro-war Lynn Cheney’s recent effort, or even Adolf Hitler’s in 1933, but rather that of the great Ch’in Emperor, Shih Wang-ti (a central figure in the recent film, Hero) of imperial China in 221 B.C.

In Rome, before it was co-opted by the State, early Christianity was in many ways a tax revolt against the Roman Empire’s increasing taxation burdens, ineptitude, and brutality. But instead of fighting taxes directly, which would have been quite fatal, the Christians (in keeping with Jesus’s teachings of the Golden Rule and peace) sought to evade the Roman taxes by steering clear of the State and taking care of their own and others. For example, by 150 A.D. in the City of Rome, Christians, and not the State, were taking care of 1,500 widows and orphans, and if you were captured or kidnapped by barbarians (much as in Iraq today) your only hope of ransom was if you were a Christian.

However, by the 4th century the growing strength of many diverse Christian groups (aided by their assimilation of older religious ideas from the East) and the decline of the Roman Empire had made it clear to the Roman State under Constantine that its survival would require formally merging with and centralizing Christianity. (Charles Freeman’s recent book, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason details the way in which this took place.)

There had already been a rise of mysticism in the Greek Empire phase of classical civilization, led by Pythagoras against Ionian empiricism, and later this same irrational process was repeated in Rome. What was left of Roman “science” declined as “faith” rose to be preserved and carried to the West later by Islamic civilization.

And as Western Civilization emerged out of the ruins of the western part of the Roman Empire, we evolved to America on the periphery of the European core—pragmatic, Calvinist, fundamentalist (certainly not showing much influence of such natural-law thinkers as Thomas Aquinas), with America believing itself an exception to history (a messianic vision often shared by the periphery).

Given that historical context, American writers began to talk as early as 1828 of some U.S. leaders as Caesars. While the Founders sought to separate the State and religion, we never quite had a theocracy, but rather an “Erastian”-type state in New England (reminiscent of the theocratic doctrines adopted in Geneva from the Swiss theologian Thomas Erastus, 1524-1583), where formal governmental leaders were heavily influenced by religious ones. And so, with the growing corrupt, corporate-state empire based in America today, religionists have put themselves forward as one of the key corporate entities in that structure, and the fundamentalists have found their man in George W. Bush....

Harassment complaints aimed at pastor
LeCLAIRE, Iowa — The pastor who got the attention of his community and the police when he posted a graphic anti-abortion sign in his yard now faces harassment complaints from two church members who say he hounded them for supporting a presidential candidate different than his.

The women accuse the Rev. Tim Groves, pastor of New Life Community Church in LeClaire, of repeatedly harassing them by telephone and in visits to their homes because they supported John Kerry and say they are distraught over feeling forced to leave the church they love.

“I pounded a nail in the first church here in town,” Helen Talbot, 80, said Tuesday as she sat surrounded by portraits of Jesus on her living room wall. “I was 6 years old and my uncle held me up on the scaffold so I could pound a nail.

“I read my Bible every day,” she said. “Now my pastor has called me a liar for telling what he did.”

In the past week, Groves has told Talbot and Clarice Mizer, 73, that they violated church policy by taking their complaints to police rather than trying to resolve them at church....

...Talbot said her relationship with the pastor has been strained in recent months, but it boiled over after a church deacon came to her house and told her to remove Kerry campaign signs from her yard. She said Groves followed up with a phone call, telling her she is not a Christian if she supports Democrats.

She said the calls from Groves continued while she was in a Davenport hospital for surgery.

Mizer said she has had similar run-ins with the pastor.

“He was continually calling me and telling me that if I was standing before God I would be condemned for voting for Kerry,” she said. “He called him (U.S. Sen Kerry, D-Mass.) a murderer.

“I asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t do it.”...

...Arrowood said state church leaders in Des Moines also are aware of problems in LeClaire and expressed concern over language in a letter sent to church members last month in which Groves referred to a meeting with the devil.

“It was Wednesday night, October 6th, that the Devil appeared to me in my living room and clearly spoke to me as you would speak to a neighbor,” he wrote in the six-page letter.

“Now I know we live in a milk toast society where we’re suppose to tolerate everybody else and we Christians are suppose to be these compassionate do-gooders who never squawk or squeak and certainly don’t get involved in any area of life except for church life,” he wrote. “Well, news flash, church, that’s a LIE from the DEVIL.”

Arrowood categorized the message as “very unusual” and said he is reading more of Groves’ writings.

Meanwhile, Talbot and Mizer said they have suffered emotionally and physically from the stress of the fallout at their beloved church.

Mizer said she worries about what will happen next.

“I’ve got to get my Life Alert key to my apartment back from the pastor,” she said. “I’ll have to ask the police to help me because he won’t like that.

“He knows I’m not a well person and when he yells at me it upsets me no end.”...

Presbyterian Church threatened over Israel
The Presbyterian Church USA stepped up security at its headquarters and its churches after receiving a letter threatening arson attacks because of its policies in the Middle East.

The letter, received Nov. 10 at the church's Louisville headquarters, threatened to set churches on fire while people were inside in retaliation for "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes," said Jerry Van Marter, director of the Presbyterian news service.

The letter had no return address, but it was postmarked from Queens, N.Y., Van Marter said. The letter gave a Nov. 15 deadline for the church to reverse its Middle East policies, he said.

In June, the church's General Assembly decided to begin selective divestment from corporations doing business in or with Israel.

Video shows Marine killing wounded Iraqi
FALLUJAH, Iraq — The U.S. military is investigating the killing of a wounded and apparently unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque during combat operations here, the Defense Department told NBC News on Monday....

...Sites was present when a lieutenant from one of the units asked a Marine what had happened inside the mosque. The Marine replied that there were people inside.

“Did you shoot them?” the lieutenant asked.

“Roger that, sir,” the second Marine replied.

“Were they armed?” the lieutenant asked.

The second Marine shrugged in reply....

...One of the Marines noticed that one of the severely wounded men was still breathing. He did not appear to be armed, Sites said.

The Marine could be heard insisting: “He’s f---ing faking he’s dead — he’s faking he’s f---ing dead.” Sites then watched as the Marine raised his rifle and fired into the man’s head from point-blank range.

“Well, he’s dead now,” another Marine said....

Monday, November 15, 2004

MORE DIVORCE IN RED STATES
New York Times News Service
Nov. 14, 2004
Kentucky and Bible Belt among highest of all
By Pam Belluck

BOSTON - If blue states care less about moral values, why are divorce rates
so low in the bluest of the blue states? It's a question that intrigues
conservatives, as much as it emboldens liberals.

As researchers have noted, the areas of the country where divorce rates are
highest are also often the areas where many conservative Christians live.

Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for
constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriage. But they had three of
the highest divorce rates in 2003, according to figures from the Census
Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.

The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and
the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was
Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedys and same-sex marriage.

In 2003, the rate in Massachusetts was 5.7 divorces per 1,000 married
people, compared with 10.8 in Kentucky, 11.1 in Mississippi and 12.7 in
Arkansas.

"Some people are saying, 'The Bible Belt is so pro-marriage, but gee, they
have the highest divorce rates in the country,'" said Barbara Dafoe
Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers
University. "And there's a lot of worry in the red states about the high
rate of divorce."

The Barna Group, a California organization that studies evangelical
Christian trends, has produced two studies about divorce that found that
born-again Christians were just as likely to divorce as those who are not
born-again Christians.

One of the reports, a survey of 7,043 people in 2001, said that: "Residents
of the Northeast and West are commonly noted for their more liberal leanings
in politics and lifestyle. However, the region of the nation in which
divorce was least likely was the Northeast."

The other study, published two months ago, said that even though the
Northeast probably had a higher rate of couples living together rather than
marrying, the divorce rate would be essentially similar even if the
cohabiting couples got hitched. And it said that "relatively few divorced
Christians experienced their divorce before accepting Christ as their
savior."

George Barna, the head of the organization, said that "a lot of really nice
Christian people try to shoot down the research by saying 'Oh, they got
divorced and then they became born again.' That's just not true."

What accounts for the nation's divorce dichotomy is the subject of much
speculation.

Some people, like Bridget Maher, an analyst on marriage and family issues at
the conservative Family Research Council, attribute it almost entirely to
the religions in the different regions. "The Northeast and Midwest have high
populations of Catholics and Lutherans and they have lower divorce rates
than other Christians," she said.

Others, like Patrick F. Fagan, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation,
say it has nothing to do with differences between faiths.

"People who worship frequently, no matter what their faith, tend to divorce
much, much, much less," said Fagan, making an argument that might suggest
that Northeasterners are more devout than other people. "All this talk about
this faith, that faith, born again, not born again, to me is irrelevant."

Many experts find the explanation to be more multidimensional, tying high
divorce rates to factors like younger age of marriage, less education and
lower socioeconomic status.

"The higher the educational level, higher the occupational level, higher the
income, the less likely you are to divorce," said William V. D'Antonio, a
sociologist at the Catholic University of America, noting that Massachusetts
has the highest rate of high school and college completion. "Kids who drop
out of high school and get married very quickly suffer from the strains of
not being emotionally mature and not having the income to help weather the
difficulties of marriage."

Whitehead, who lives in Amherst, Mass., said that New England is a region
that has "more stability" than other regions. "People stay here, their
families stay here, and there's more social and family support for people, a
more communal versus individualistic culture in New England compared to the
cowboy states."

She said religion may underscore those regional differences.

"In states with lots of evangelicals, the more individualistic Protestant
religious faiths may actually also encourage more go-it-alone attitudes than
communal ones," Whitehead said. And these are also states where the culture
encourages sexual abstinence before marriage, she said.

Bush, God and the Election
...Just as important in Bush's success is his approach to foreign policy since the attacks of September 11. Under the mantle of a "war on terrorism," the president and his administration have converged a religious fundamentalist worldview with a political agenda. It is a modern form of political fundamentalism--that is, the adaptation of a self-proclaimed conservative Christian rectitude, via sophisticated strategic communications, into political policy. This fusion of religion and politics has offered comfort to a nation gripped by anxiety about terrorism and the U.S. position in the world.

The administration's political fundamentalism is evident in a striking change in White House rhetoric. Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing, favor, and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world. Put simply, Bush's language suggests that he speaks not only of God and to God, but also for God. Among modern presidents, only Ronald Reagan has spoken in a similar manner--and he did so far less frequently than has Bush....

...Over the past three years, however, the administration's religious-cum-political outlook has transformed Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" policy to "Either you are with us, or you are against God." To the great detriment of American democracy and the global public, this suggestion sounds remarkably similar to that of the terrorists we are fighting.

Further, it is clear that a good number of Americans--including many of religious faith--and billions of global citizens are leery of this president's fusion of politics and religion. To cite just one example, more than 200 U.S. evangelical leaders in October signed a petition that condemns the administration's convergence of God and nation in constructing a "theology of war."

Unfortunately it is likely that the president, who spoke after his re-election about his newly earned "political capital," is not listening. As a result, we will continue to face this frightening prospect: two leaders of powerful forces, both claiming assuredly that they are performing God's will, acting so as to annihilate the other.

Ashcroft to Judges: Stop "Second-Guessing" Bush
In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called "a profoundly disturbing trend" among some judges to interfere in the president's constitutional authority to make decisions during war.

"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society.

The people…have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.
-- T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920

Presbyterian Church receives arson threat over Middle East policies
LOUISVILLE, Ky. Presbyterian Churches in the U-S have been put on high alert.
This after a letter received at the church's Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters
threatened arson attacks because of the church's policies toward the Middle
East.

A church spokesman says the letter threatened to set churches on fire while
people were inside in retaliation for "anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes."

The spokesman says the letter had no return address, but was postmarked Queens,
New York.

The church's General Assembly decided in June to begin the process of selective
divestment from corporations supporting the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank....

What do police departments really do?
... Read Stephen Davies' excellent research on "The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in the 2002 book "The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society." What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do "social policing" of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new "crimes" for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom.

The creation of government police forces thus did not and does not diminish crime rates, and was never expected to. In fact, the professor finds it generally increases reported crime rates. This makes sense if we stop to think what modern police forces actually do.

Let us suppose that, magically, there were no police. You are sitting at home of an evening, quietly reading a book. Next door, behind his own locked doors, your 21-year-old neighbor, who inherited some handguns from his grandfather, is spending time with his 16- or 17-year-old sweetheart, whose family is happy to know she intends to marry him and bear his children as soon as she graduates high school. At the moment, the two of them are consuming some of the marijuana they grow in their back yard.

If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race downtown, pounding on the door of the sleeping magistrate, insisting he swear out a warrant so you can rush back to your neighborhood, break into your neighbor's home and arrest him?

Of course not. He's hurting no one.

But now let us return to a present era in which we maintain large, professional police forces. Earlier this day, unbeknownst to you or your neighbor, officers busted one of your neighbor's friends for driving a car with an out-of-date registration. (Oh, the horror.) Searching the car without a warrant, the "officers" found marijuana. Bargaining to stay out of jail, the young man tells the officers he got it from your neighbor.

As we speak, do you suppose Officer Friendly and Officer Brown are down at the station house, playing cards and waiting to see if anyone will call in any armed robberies tonight?

Of course not. Clad in full SWAT gear, with machine pistols and bulletproof vests, they are currently lurking in your neighbor's bushes, trying to peek in his windows. Before dawn they will break down his front door with a battering ram, drag him out half-naked and in handcuffs and proceed to send him to prison for decades for 1) possessions of unregistered handguns without a license; 2) "manufacturing for purposes of sale a deadly narcotic," that is to say, his backyard marijuana; and 3) "statutory rape" of his fiancee, regardless of whether or not their planned union has the blessing of her family.

The reported "crime rate" in your neighborhood just skyrocketed. Is this because your neighbor has hurt anyone, or has been caught doing anything that normal people have not been doing for thousands of years?

Of course not. Our great-grandparents would be astonished to learn that such "crimes" are even on the books.

The only thing that has changed is that our land is now occupied by large, professional, overlapping paramilitary "police forces" that have to keep busy, ginning up manufactured "crime waves" and filling the prisons (we now have the highest incarceration rate in the world -- and many of those inmates have never hurt anyone), in order to justify their ever-burgeoning budgets.

Saturday, November 13, 2004

Our Vanished Values
... For make no mistake, this is the election in which American Christianity destroyed itself. Today the church is no longer a religion but a tacky political lobby, with an obsessive concentration on a minuscule number of social topics so irrelevant to questions of governance that they barely constitute political issues at all. These are the points of contention tied into what are blurrily referred to as "moral values," though they have almost nothing to do with the larger moral question of how one lives one's life, and everything to do with the fundamentally un-Christian and un-American idea of forcing others to live the way you believe they should. The displacement of faith involved is eerie, almost psychotic: Here are people willing to vote against their own well-being and their own children's future, just so they can compel someone else's daughter to bear an unwanted child and deprive someone else's son of the right to file a joint income tax return with his male partner.

If this isn't Christianity-and it isn't-still less is it in any respect like democracy. The whole meaning of America was predicated by the founding fathers on the right of citizens to practice their own faith and conduct their lives as they saw fit; to interfere actively in others' lives, on the basis of "moral values" about which there is no agreement, is the most radical repudiation of constitutional values in our electoral history, reducing the word conservative to absurdity. Today the Republican Party is not the right wing of anything; it is a band of violent radical reactionaries preaching medieval totalitarian bigotry. And Christianity as currently preached and practiced in Middle America is virtually Satan, by the standards of anyone who strives to follow the teachings of Jesus. Having degraded themselves to the level of political lobbies, most Christian churches should certainly be compelled to register as lobbyists and pay taxes.

Our bogus Christians' desire to totalitarianize, ironically, is the mirror image of the thing they most fear, which was the other great paradoxical source of Bush's victory: bogus Islam. If it is only in the last four decades that American Christianity has steadily thrown up walls of hostility against the complex and disturbing changes of contemporary life, Islam has had nine or 10 centuries of practice at shutting out social change. The incursion of modern technology, though, and of windfalls from the Western world's craving for Middle Eastern oil, were beginning to alter the pattern of centuries for the better: There is today a small but emphatic body of educated Muslims desiring to be both modern and moderate.

The chief obstacle to their achieving this goal has been-bitter, bitter irony-our Republican administrations, which have had the persistent habit of arming Islamic extremists and totalitarians, then turning around and waging new mini-Crusades against them. Bush's repulsive attempt to redouble his father's mistakes in Iraq, as a diversion from his failure to capture Osama bin Laden, has made this hideous situation irreparably worse, with new outrages and new devastations almost every day. If the hopes for a reasonable Islam, decisively repudiating the "Islamo-fascists" whose main interest in life seems to be videotaping the decapitation of foreigners, have dwindled rapidly, it's Bush's Christianized view of world affairs that has made them do so. Christians who believe, as many Bush voters undoubtedly do, that all Muslims are terrorists by definition should take the beam out of their own eye before criticizing the mote in the mosque next door.

Fear and prejudice, Bush's twin allies, go hand in hand with the refusal to think, something that has always been part of American politics: The Republican Party actually had its origins, in the 1840s, as a faction of the anti-immigrant, fundamentalist Know-Nothing movement. A century and a half have only upped the ante: We live in a country as flooded with information as it is with conflicting viewpoints and contrasting ways of life. To understand the mistaken half of our electorate, we have to begin with the realization that this flood of data can itself be a source of fear....

Perverted, God-Hating Frenchies vs. Inbred, Sex-Obsessed Yokels
Why Can't Liberals and Conservatives Get Along? Because They Fundamentally Misunderstand Each Other
I was waiting to go on a conservative talk radio show and heard the host say that John Kerry and his supporters "have no God" because they don’t stand up to evil. He went on to claim that "even the mention of God terrifies them." As for religious people who go to church regularly but vote Democratic, he said, "I see them as sort of phonies."

Then I came on, and his question to me was, "Why do secular people think we're all a bunch of intolerant people?"...

...TRUTH ABOUT LIBERALS #5
Family Values Are Revered

Telling someone they are against "family values" is not far from telling them they’re bad parents. Most liberal parents (like most conservatives) spend most of their days thinking not about politics but about how to raise good kids. It’s probably not worthwhile to try to figure out who is better at it but these statistics ought to at least pour cold water on conservative self righteousness on this point: of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates, ten of them voted for Bush. Of the 10 states with the lowest divorce rates, 9 of them voted for Kerry. And the state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation? Massachusetts....

Scary Times, Even For A Preacher
In my lifetime, there's been one constant in American culture. We've always needed a good target — someone to blame for all our fears and unmet dreams.

African Americans, hippies, communists, Mexican immigrants, homosexuals.

I missed a couple of groups, but you get the point. And the reason I bring this up is that I met with a retired preacher the other day, and he put it all in perspective.

The Rev. John H. Townsend, pastor emeritus of the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles, had dropped me a line after the election. He was grieving over what he called the current "corruption of Christian faith."...

...So it should come as no surprise that Townsend wasn't too happy with the role "Christianity" played in the recent presidential election. From where he sits, Christianity was used to divide and conquer....

...One corruption of the faith, Townsend says, is the selective use of biblical passages by the religious right. Interpreting literally, he pointed out, you can use the Bible to perpetrate all manner of horrors.

"In Psalms, there's a passage about when the enemy comes, you should bash the heads of children against the stones," he said, going on to cite several more examples.

"The Bible must be read contextually, and the real test for us today is: What would Jesus say or do? If he's our touchstone, and Jesus says love your neighbor, that seems more Christian to me than judge your neighbor."...

...There's nothing wrong with vigorously debating Christian values, Townsend says.

"Absolutes escape us."

But President Bush has left no room for that discussion.

"This business of Bush's about reporting to a higher authority, well, I don't say he shouldn't feel that way. But why does he have to tell us? That's what I mean by triumphalism. How can I answer his claim if he's getting this from direct revelation? It pulls the plug on reasonable discourse....

Thursday, November 11, 2004

On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide
...If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.

Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").

None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.

The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry. And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a former employee's accusation that the two had had a homosexual encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000 settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock alternative to MTV's "Rock the Vote."

But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."

It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.

But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than the number of gay Republican voters.

When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment....

License To Thrill
...The examples Wilkinson gives of miraculous answered prayers include the evangelizing of Long Island in six weeks and the taking over of the island of Trinidad for Christ (you may have missed these, but never mind)....

...Laurie Beth Jones is less inclined to promise "miracles," if only because she believes Jesus’ advice as a life coach should be transparent to anyone’s understanding and easily applicable to anyone’s life. Her Jesus, Life Coach follows other best sellers such as Jesus, Entrepreneur and Jesus, CEO. A "life coach" is similar to a psychotherapist, only with the intention of encouraging the client toward greater success in the future rather than digging around in the same old painful past.

Jones offers short snippets for chapters, crafted for devotional-style reading in a single sitting. These typically open with a cute vignette from her own experience, then draw a conclusion for how to be more successful in life or business, and finally show from scripture that Jesus teaches his "staff" (the disciples) the same lesson, on the way to making them into "lean, clean marketing machines." Jesus himself "practiced focused thinking." His "get behind me Satan" was a keen diagnosis of Peter’s disproportionate "need for human approval." Jesus gave his followers each their own "Individualized Education Plan," as any coach would. Jesus’ spat with Mary at Cana shows he was "very conscious of his boundaries." My favorite example from this collection of campy, patronizing readings of scripture: "Even from the cross he was delegating: ‘Mary, this is your new son, John.’"

I wish such uses of scripture were self-evidently ridiculous, but Jones’ sales success suggests they are not. Suffice it to say that an American business person whose "Individualized Education Plan" for himself included such "positive confrontation" with authorities that he and his "staff" wound up summarily excluded by their co-religionists and tortured to death by the state for high treason would not likely unearth the desire to go and do likewise from many "customers." Never mind how Jesus and his disciples wound up; Jones is doing swimmingly.

JOHN ELDREDGE’S Wild at Heart is the most substantial of the three, even if that’s not saying much. Jesus’ plan to make us happier, Wild at Heart declares, is for men to be men again. Eldredge looks around at the men in his church and describes them as "nice" and "boring." He sees them wallowing away at jobs in cubicles and at various spare-time amusements in the suburbs and insists that what’s missing is men’s specifically masculine hearts. God designed man with three great needs: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to save.

So how shall men recover their battling, adventuring, beauty-saving hearts? By watching lots of movies, engaging in various extreme and outdoor sports, participating in devotional exercises in which God speaks to you directly, and by having a wife who wants to be rescued by a manly man and sons who want to test their strength against their father by wrestling and pursuing games involving guns.

Eldredge refers to popular films more than any other source in his book. This is not accidental. Movies portray manly battles in a safe way. Braveheart, Gladiator, and Henry V come in for particular praise. Eldredge writes about what he "heard" from the Lord at one point in prayer: "You are Henry V after Agincourt...the man in the arena, whose face is covered with blood and sweat and dust, who strove valiantly...a great warrior...." The Lord himself is a "warrior" in Exodus and covered in blood in Isaiah, and Christians who would point to Jesus’ turning of the other cheek run the risk of being "emasculated." To show the importance of saving a beauty, Eldredge points to various James Bond and Indiana Jones films, in which getting the girl is crucial to being the hero. In all this he asks: Isn’t a few minutes of any one of these films a great deal more thrilling than a lifetime in the average church, where most men are chipper but boring, and women unloved and tired?...

Bob Jones wants payback
In your re-election, God has graciously granted America--though she doesn't deserve it--a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet. Because you seek the Lord daily, we who know the Lord will follow that kind of voice eagerly.

Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ. Honor the Lord, and He will honor you.

Had your opponent won, I would have still given thanks, because the Bible says I must (I Thessalonians 5:18). It would have been hard, but because the Lord lifts up whom He will and pulls down whom He will, I would have done it. It is easy to rejoice today, because Christ has allowed you to be His servant in this nation for another presidential term. Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years--a brief time only--to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

...The oddity of this Red State moralism argument emerges most clearly when you look at statistics for virtually every form of quantifiable social dysfunction. Divorce, out-of-wedlock birth, poverty, murder, incidence of preventable disease --- go down the list and you’ll see that they are all highest in the reddest states and lowest in the bluest.

There are exceptions certainly --- the Prairie states being the key examples. But the pattern is striking and consistent.

The issue that interested me most were the statistics on murder, in part because they seemed to have the most interesting historical roots. Murder rates are also least affected by cultural bias. For instance, non-reporting of rape varies widely from country to country and region to region. The same can be true of assault. Murder, on the other hand, tends to get reported, regardless of the cultural context.

Thankfully, murder rates in the United States have dropped rapidly over the last decade. But the regional patterns remain. Broadly speaking, New England and the parts of the country originally settled by New Englanders have low murder rates --- some only a fraction of the national averages. The South on the other hand, and the parts of the country originally settled by Southerners, have higher murder rates. (The highest homicide rates are in the Old Southwest --- Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.)...

Marines turn to God ahead of anticipated Fallujah battle
With US forces massing outside Fallujah, 35 marines swayed to Christian rock music and asked Jesus Christ to protect them in what could be the biggest battle since American troops invaded Iraq Iraq last year.

Men with buzzcuts and clad in their camouflage waved their hands in the air, M-16 assault rifles laying beside them, and chanted heavy metal-flavoured lyrics in praise of Christ late Friday in a yellow-brick chapel.

They counted among thousands of troops surrounding the city of Fallujah, seeking solace as they awaited Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's decision on whether or not to invade Fallujah.

"You are the sovereign. You're name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb," a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them.

The US military, with many soldiers coming from the conservative American south and midwest, has deep Christian roots.

In times that fighting looms, many soldiers draw on their evangelical or born-again heritage to help them face the battle.

"It's always comforting. Church attendance is always up before the big push," said First Sergeant Miles Thatford.

"Sometimes, all you've got is God."

Between the service's electric guitar religious tunes, marines stepped up on the chapel's small stage and recited a verse of scripture, meant to fortify them for war.

One spoke of their Old Testament hero, a shepherd who would become Israel's king, battling the Philistines some 3,000 years ago.

"Thus David prevailed over the Philistines," the marine said, reading from scripture, and the marines shouted back "Hoorah, King David," using their signature grunt of approval.

US Marine in Abrams tankThe marines drew parallels from the verse with their present situation, where they perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world.

"Victory belongs to the Lord," another young marine read.

Their chaplain, named Horne, told the worshippers they were stationed outside Fallujah to bring the Iraqis "freedom from oppression, rape, torture and murder ... We ask you God to bless us in that effort."

The marines then lined up and their chaplain blessed them with holy oil to protect them.

"God's people would be annointed with oil," the chaplain said, as he lightly dabbed oil on the marines' foreheads.

The crowd then followed him outside their small auditorium for a baptism of about a half-dozen marines who had just found Christ.

The young men lined up and at least three of them stripped down to their shorts.

The three laid down in a rubber dinghy filled with water and the chaplain's assistant, Navy corpsman Richard Vaughn, plunged their heads beneath the surface.

Smiling, Vaughn baptised them "in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

Dripping wet, Corporal Keith Arguelles beamed after his baptism.

"I just wanted to make sure I did this before I headed into the fight," he said on the military base not far from the city of Fallujah.

Labels: evilvangelicals

Did God Intervene?
Evangelicals are crediting God with securing re-election victory for George W. Bush.

On the day after President Bush was re-elected, he gave much of the credit to his political adviser, Karl Rove, whom he called “the architect” of his campaign. But in evangelical churches, on Christian radio, and in voter precincts dominated by conservative Christians, the credit is going instead to someone a whole lot more powerful: God.

The Almighty intervened in the U.S. election, these evangelicals believe, to allow Bush to remain president. They say God has “blessed” America with Bush--and had Sen. John Kerry been elected, God would have “cursed” the U.S. By allowing Bush to be re-elected, God has given America “more time” to stop its slide into evil.

“This was Providence,” evangelical leader and presidential adviser Charles Colson told Beliefnet. “Anybody looking at the 2000 election would have to say it was…a miraculous deliverance, and I think people felt it again this year.” By allowing Bush to stay in office, Colson said, God is “giving us a chance to repent and to restore some moral sanity to American life.”

Richard Land, a leading Southern Baptist who participates in a weekly strategy call between the White House and evangelical leaders put it this way: “Whoever won, it would have been God’s will.” But because Bush won, Land told Beliefnet, God has clearly shown America his blessings. If Kerry had won, it would have proved God was cursing the United States. “The Bible says godly leadership is a sign of God’s blessings and a lack of godly leadership is a sign of God’s judgment. I don’t see Kerry as a godly leader.”

Meanwhile, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation and one of the original engineers of the conservative Christian political revolution, wrote an essay claiming that “God gave this President and this President’s Party one more chance…God heard the fervent prayers of millions of values voters to keep His hand on America one more time despite our national sins of denying the right to life, despite ignoring the Biblical injunction against acts which are ‘an abomination unto the Lord’ and despite the blatant attempt to remove God from the public square.”

Jim Rogers of the group Mission America sent out an email the day after the election saying, "Yesterday America cried out and He heard from heaven and answered our prayers. PRAISE GOD!!"

Plenty of ordinary American evangelicals also believe that by allowing Bush to be re-elected, God has given the United States another chance. For months leading up to the election, many Christians nationwide prayed and fasted, in an effort led by Intercessors for America, to assist in Bush’s re-election.

Among them was Diana Sheehan, a mother and housewife who led a weekly prayer group at her Pennsylvania church whose sole task was to pray about the election. For 40 days ending on Nov. 2, she also participated in a no-sugar fast. On Election Day, Sheehan paced back and forth reading the Bible in her church, Dove Christian Fellowship in Ephrata, Pa., as part of a round-the-clock 48-hour prayer vigil for the president. His reelection, she said, was God’s signal that "he's giving us more time to get our act together. I think this nation is going down the tubes very quickly."

Across town at a local polling place, Republican committeewoman Anna Mae Ressler said Bush’s re-election would mean that God has "answered our prayers and given us another chance." Ressler said she had been reading the Book of Jeremiah, which she believes parallels American history. "When that nation got so bad, the Lord sent them into captivity," Ressler explained. "We've done an awful lot of things in this country that are displeasing to God."

Now that God has given America extra time from which to be spared his wrath, evangelicals feel some urgency to buckle down to God’s business. That is why, for example, a group called Christian Response has already sent out an email with the subject line “EMERGENCY!” to induce supporters to blast Capitol Hill with faxes condemning Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican Pennsylvania senator who said last week that judicial nominees who oppose abortion would face difficulty getting Senate confirmation. The Family Research Council and Focus on the Family followed within hours with emails entitled "Stop Specter."

Many evangelicals think America is secular and decadent and in cultural decline. Their role, they believe, is to stem that tide and renew the culture. Many of these Christians seem to believe that God will be angry with them—and with the entire nation—if they don’t make big legislative changes. And so, they put themselves on a short leash with God, and they hope to convince other Americans to do likewise.

“God is not going to tolerate a nation that thumbs its nose at Him,” Colson says. “This whole idea of scrubbing all religious influence out of public life and taking down the Ten Commandments and stopping prayer and not allowing people to talk about their faith for fear of offending someone--I don’t think God honors that. God’s patience runs out.”...

Business Owner Arrested After Allegedly Spanking Two Employees
Paul Eugene Levengood, 57, was charged with two counts of sexual battery after the 19-year-old women complained.

One of the women told police that on her first day at the Tasty Flavors Sno Biz, Levengood made her sign a statement that said: "I give Gene permission to bust my behind any way he sees fit."

Police Sgt. Jay LaMance said the women likely accepted the spankings instead of leaving immediately because they were "brought up to respect anybody who is an authority figure."...

... She said that as punishment Levengood "bent her over his knee and spanked her behind 20 times." She said that a day earlier he "snapped a photograph of her behind" as she reached for a bottle on a shelf.

Levengood was freed on $2,000 bail pending a Nov. 16 court hearing. His franchise in this Chattanooga suburb was closed Tuesday.

At the company headquarters in Minneapolis, sales manager Tom Novetzke described Levengood as a "very Christian person," adding that "We've never had a complaint."

Nailing the Guilty
Now that the election’s over, President Bush needs to deep-six his candidate hat and get serious as commander-in-chief. His first priority should be to hold accountable those defense and intelligence chiefs and their high-level underlings responsible for the many grievous, even criminal, mistakes that have occurred in Iraq on their watch.

Without a constructive critique of what’s gone down in that beleaguered country – a no-holds-barred appraisal that actually changes America’s ill-conceived counterinsurgency direction – we'll be stuck in a protracted struggle that will only get uglier as the terrible weeks, months and years bleed by.

Meanwhile, give or take a few captains and colonels, not one senior-level perp’s been sacked. And we’re talking about the brass responsible for gravely consequential life-and-death screw-ups such as: insufficient troop allocation for the occupation phase; premature disbandment of the Iraqi army, police and other security forces; unrealistic initial planning and amateur execution during Round One of rebuilding a new Iraqi army; top leadership dereliction of duty that allowed the prison abuses; and the shocking inability to understand the very nature of the war in which our fine soldiers are engaged.

I constantly hear the chant that we must support our troops. But what I see is more superficial lip service than serious consideration for our warriors’ welfare. If our top generals truly supported the troops, for example, they would have acknowledged that we were about to become engaged in a long-term insurgency campaign – and planned appropriately – long before the first tank shocked-and-awed its way into Iraq....

Flocking to Bush
It is estimated that in the 2000 Presidential election, 40% of the votes cast in favor of George W. Bush came from the Evangelical Christian movement. Bush had worked carefully to cultivate a base of support within this movement, to expand upon it and to retain it. Correctly, Bush advisers saw this movement as George W’s political salvation.

What was it about Bush which drew right wing Christians to his pulpit? Certainly the ticket of Albert Gore and Joseph Lieberman, stained with the legacy of Bill Clinton’s peccadilloes, was not an option for Bible-believing Christians. More importantly though, George Bush was one of them. On his 40th birthday, Bush forswore alcohol and the party life to discover Jesus and become born again. His conversion came at the hands of none other than the Reverend Billy Graham.

This is a familiar pattern among those who become born again. They seem to find God the same way that they found other altars in their lives such as alcohol, drugs or gambling. They tried alcohol and they were hooked. They tried drugs and they were hooked. They tried gambling and they were hooked. They tried the Bible and they were hooked.

Nothing else is quite as important. Evangelical ministers are the father figures they had been missing in life – the men who would guide these lost sheep into the flock and direct their every move thereafter. This is one of the main appeals of born again life. It really requires no thought and no introspection. For individuals who never could take responsibility for their lives, this pitch offers the perfect solution. Just follow the rule book and everything will be fine....

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

The Road to Abu Ghraib
The biggest scandal of the Bush administration began at the top.

A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq. On that date, “CBS News” broadcast the first ugly photographs of abuses by American soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. There were images of a man standing hooded on a box with wires attached to his hands; of guards leering as they forced naked men to simulate sexual acts; of a man led around on a leash by a female soldier; of a dead Iraqi detainee, packed in ice; and more. The pictures had been taken the previous fall by U.S. Army military police soldiers assigned to the prison, but had made it into the hands of Army criminal investigators only months later, when a soldier named Joseph Darby anonymously passed them a CD-ROM full of prison photos. The images aroused worldwide indignation, and illustrated in graphic detail both the lengths to which the United States would go to get intelligence, and the extent to which those efforts had been corrupted by the exigencies of the difficult war in Iraq.

Two days later, The New Yorker published a report on Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh. Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on the U.S. Army's atrocities in Vietnam; now he had come full circle, documenting the full extent of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Army's initial efforts to investigate them. Hersh's reporting—which forms the nucleus of his new book, Chain of Command—helped launch nearly a dozen different criminal investigations into what former vice president Al Gore dubbed “the American Gulag,” the extraterritorial chain of prisons and detainment centers, stretching from Guantanamo Bay to Afghanistan, set up by the Bush administration to hold suspected terrorists. More than 300 instances of abuse in those facilities, from November 2001 to as recently as March 2004, have been alleged since then. To date, eight out of 11 investigations have been completed. They have produced thousands of documents, witness interviews, military orders, emails, and PowerPoint briefings, with each one telling a small piece of the story of how America's vaunted all-volunteer professional military lapsed into some of the most unprofessional and despicable conduct of its history. Forty-five soldiers have been recommended for courts-martial, and 23 others for summary discharge. Nearly one year after the first sadistic acts took place, the extent of the abuses remains unknown. But by all indications, the worst revelations are yet to come. In closed-door presentations before Congress, Pentagon officials revealed evidence of crimes ranging from the rape of female detainees to the sexual abuse of minors held at Abu Ghraib.

There is no doubt that the abuses at Abu Ghraib stand as an indelible stain on the honor of the American military. What is less clear is the degree to which the resulting scandal has damaged our national security and undermined our efforts to bring peace to Iraq and win the war against radical terrorism—a war that is as much a fight for the political and moral high ground as it is a shooting war that pits American soldiers against Islamist ones. America suffered a huge defeat the moment those photographs became public. Copies of them are now sold in souks from Marrakesh to Jakarta, vivid illustrations of the worst suspicions of the Arab world: that Americans are corrupt and power-mad, eager to humiliate Muslims and mock their values. The acts they document have helped to energize the insurgency in Iraq, undermining our rule there and magnifying the risks faced by our soldiers each day. If Osama bin Laden had hired a Madison Avenue public relations firm to rally Arabs hearts and minds to his cause, it's hard to imagine that it could have devised a better propaganda campaign. ...

...Defenders of the administration have argued, of course, that there is no “smoking gun”—no chain of orders leading directly from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Pfc. Lynndie England and her co-conspirators. But that reasoning—now largely accepted within the Beltway—betrays a deliberate indifference to how large organizations such as the military actually work. In any war, civilian leaders set strategic aims, and it falls to commanders and planners at successively lower levels of command to refine that guidance into executable orders which can be handed down to subordinates. That process works whether the policy in question is a good one or a bad one. President Bush didn't order the April 2003 “thunder run” into Baghdad; he ordered Tommy Franks to win the war and the Third Infantry Division's leaders figured out how to make it happen. Likewise, no order was given to shove light sticks into the rectums of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, the road to the abuses began with flawed administration policies that exalted expediency and necessity over the rule of law, eviscerated the military's institutional constraints on the treatment of prisoners, commenced combat with insufficient planning, preparation and troop strength, and thereby set the conditions for the abuses that would later take place....

Taurus: (April. 20—May 20)
You'll never be quite the same again after that Bible you've been thumping all these years finally has enough and beats the living shit out of you.

The Devil Made Them Do It?
Elections, Religion and the American People

The discussion over the election has been raging here at Harvard Divinity School. Many of the students supported Kerry and they, like many progressives in this country, are angry and confused about this election. The seeming widespread anger at the Bush Administration did not translate into an electoral victory for Kerry and many are wondering what went wrong. Seeing so many "red states" on the map leads some to the conclusion that the country is irredeemably reactionary. In particular, the role of the "religious right" has been the focus of much attention in the media. It seems clear that this bloc of right-wing, evangelical Christian voters turned out in large numbers, as 22 percent of voters cited "moral values" as the most important issue to them. In addition, weekly church goers overwhelmingly voted for Bush (61 percent to 39 percent). The display of power by the "religious right" has caused some people on the religious left to draw all kinds of off-the-wall conclusions. The solutions I've heard range from suggesting that the left be more concerned about "personal morality" to the idea that Americans were too duped by a fanatical religion to vote for their "class interests."

First, a reality check. While voter turnout was 4 percent higher than in 2000, 45 percent of Americans still did not vote showing that a large segment of the population is still not engaged by the political system. In addition, that Bush mobilized his Christian conservative base is clear, but we should not exaggerate the supposed "right-wing" consciousness of the country. Polls have consistently shown a general progressive consciousness in America. An AP-Ipsis Poll showed that as recent as March 2004, 62 percent of respondents said that they would prefer more spending on health care, education and economic development than balancing the budget. A late October CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll showed that 52 percent of Americans believe that the US made a mistake in sending troops into Iraq....

...The disconnect between Americans' political consciousness and the election also has to do with the apolitical nature of elections, rooted in Americans' rightful cynicism at the electoral process and politicians. Since November 3, I have heard a barrage of anecdotes about how someone's Bush-supporting cousin, brother, sister, mother, father, or uncle cared more about the image of leadership that Bush represented, whether or not he was a "family man" or whether or not they could have a beer with him, than actual policy. Students, professors and others decried the fact that many people vote on their "emotions." It's a shame that some of these storytellers were too busy lamenting the "stupidity" of their relatives to ask why someone would have such apolitical reasons for voting in the first place. De-politicization like this is the result of cynicism due to the absence of a real political debate on issues that matter to Americans. Voting on apolitical or "moral" issues is another way of "checking out" of the political system. And Kerry's campaign was not going to reverse this cynicism. On the contrary, he probably enflamed cynicism with his disingenuous, focus-group based campaign which many people saw right through. In fact, real political debate has been absent from elections for so long, and cynicism about government is so high, that elections themselves cannot politicize people....

Pat Oliphant by Pat Oliphant

Monday, November 08, 2004

G.I.'s Open Attack to Take Falluja From Iraq Rebels
...Between 10,000 and 15,000 American soldiers and marines backed by newly trained Iraqi forces were besieging Falluja for what American commanders said was likely to be a brutal, block-by-block battle to retake control and capture, kill or disperse an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 hard-core insurgent fighters. The battle could prove the most important since the American invasion of Iraq 19 months ago.

Troops were on the move by 9 p.m. Sunday to the west and south of Falluja, just across the Euphrates River. After two hours of steady pounding by American guns, tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and AC-130 gunships, at least one objective - a hospital about half a mile west of downtown Falluja - was secured by American Special Forces and the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion.

Tracer fire lighted up the sky as the operation began, helicopters crisscrossed the battlefield, and at least one American vehicle was fired upon with a rocket-propelled grenade as American and Iraqi forces converged on Falluja General Hospital. Shortly before midnight, American forces were exchanging gunfire across a bridge near the hospital with several insurgent positions on the other side.

"There has been extensive gunfire going across the river," said the American commander of the Special Forces operation at the hospital. "Bradleys have been shooting over to the east of us, and there has been extensive machine gun fire to the southwest of us."

As that firefight raged, extensive airstrikes and artillery fire pummeled the northern and western sections of Falluja, with great blossoms of flame brightening and then fading with each boom of the heavy cannons on the AC-130 gunships, circling over the city like birds of prey.

A huge fire burned in the midst of the city. The streets themselves, as seen through the powerful night-vision equipment aboard one Bradley fighting vehicle southeast of Falluja, appeared eerily deserted.

By midnight, the bridge near the hospital and a second strategic bridge, just to the south, were secured.

Before American jets began their bombing on Monday morning, American troops in front of the hospital took intense fire from small arms and rocket-propelled grenades from insurgents across the river. American Bradleys and tanks began returning fire.

In Washington, Pentagon officials said Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were monitoring the preparations and updated combat reports.

Most civilians in Falluja, a city of about 250,000 people 35 miles west of Baghdad, were believed to have left by the time the invasion began.

It was the second time in six months that a battle had raged in Falluja. In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw.

American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed. The hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties.

"It's a center of propaganda," a senior American officer said Sunday....

God Save the Queen
Evangelicals and the Sentimental Affinities of George W. Bush

...My knowledge of how conservative evangelicals think and act is more modest in scope, but also more intimate. I’m not an evangelical, but I study them as an ethnographer. I listen to the desires, fears, and ambitions of white, conservative evangelicals in the so-called red state of Tennessee. I’ve come to know the evangelicals who are the focus of my research very well, and I’ve learned to anticipate their sentiments the way that one anticipates the reactions of a close friend. If nothing else, I can speculate on a particular structure of feeling that made many American evangelicals rally their support and their blessings behind the President because, rather than despite, the fact that his life before September 11, 2001, seemed to contain so little that would have prepared him for what was to come.

In the months prior to the election, there were countless articles, documentaries, and TV and radio segments on Bush’s evangelical faith. But nothing crystallized for me the nature of Bush’s symbolic significance among his evangelical base as compellingly as a short, pre-election email letter from Laura Bush. The email was sent out on October 26 to the newsletter subscribers of Crosswalk, a fiercely conservative, “Christ-centered, for-profit corporation” that provides daily devotionals, news digests, and numerous other Internet resources for Christians, and is one of the most popular Christian sites on the web. The “Message” from Laura Bush included a picture of her smiling face, and began “Dear Friend, We’ve watched as President Bush has led this country through the most historic struggle of our generation…” A few lines later, Laura Bush recounts the following, which she repeated at rallies on the campaign trail:

In Ohio, I visited with a woman who summed up our success this way. She said, “President Bush was born for such a time as this. He never wavers when it comes to doing the right thing. It makes me feel so secure to know that our leader has such a love for our country.”

I don’t know which part of that statement jumps out at you, but I do know which part resonated the most with popular evangelical sensibilities. Six words: “for such a time as this.”

This is not empty rhetoric. It is a straightforward reference to the Bible -- the Book of Esther, chapter 4, verse 14, to be precise -- and it is among the most evocative and meaningful catchphrases in the language of evangelicalism. ...

...In Farenheit 9/11, Michael Moore wonders what Bush might have been thinking while he sat in the classroom looking bewildered for those seven minutes after learning that a second plane struck the Twin Towers. In light of political and business links between the Bush family and its Saudi bedfellows, Moore speculates that Bush must have been thinking “Hmm, which one of my friends screwed me?” Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Sadly, that question is already beside the point.

What remains significant is how conservative evangelicals read that moment, and every presidential moment since then. If we come at this from a perspective that they might take, it follows that evangelicals did not see a bewildered politician, a man in over his head, stymied by his own inexperience and geo-political entanglements. Rather they saw the reluctant Queen Esther struggling to come to terms with the abrupt realization that she is implicated in a drama much larger than herself.

At that moment, Bush, like Esther, represented the evangelical’s greatest ambition and anxiety -- that one day he/she will be called upon to surrender him/herself to an irreversible state of being where personal faith and historical destiny become one and the same. The higher the stakes, the tougher the personal challenge. Consequently, the firmer the resolve to follow through -- regardless of obstacles or substantive realities -- the greater the faithfulness.

Bush’s Esther-appeal extends beyond the evangelical population. Millions of Americans perceive the drama of Bush’s post-9/11 leadership transformation – a drama that has not been lost on the mass media -- as a mirror of the national story of post-9/11 recovery, revenge, and revival. If we need to understand why Bush was re-elected in spite of everything -- the attacks on civil liberties, the devastating truths behind WMDs and Abu Ghraib -- we need to accept that at least on a certain level Americans are seduced by emotional drama. Yes, it is a highly moralistic nation that we live in, but it is also one whose mass culture relies heavily on its ability to dramatize itself, to tell its own story in the form of public people who bend or break like characters on a soap opera. Our national celebrities are not just people, they are allegories of us. ...

Fixing the problem of Falluja
As the last light faded at our forward base, the wiry, tough-looking staff sergeant turned to a small group of marines.

"We're not going into Falluja to give out fuzzy bears and warm hugs," he said. ...

..."The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy," said Colonel Brandl.

"But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him."

The Worst Is Yet to Come
Those "moral values" Republicans – you know, the ones who supposedly tipped the election in favor of the War Party – really are a hoot. Forget the Iraq war – killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians for no clear reason isn't a moral question as far as these folks are concerned. What they're really up in arms about is gay marriage and Hollywood's moral depravity (or do I repeat myself?).But what about this kind of depravity?:

"The Iraq war, [Norman Podhoretz] declares, has gone 'triumphantly.' The crowd applauds vigorously at this.

"Later in the day – perhaps for those wondering if the Iraqis themselves agree with Podhoretz's assessment – the conference organizers screen a trailer for Voices in Iraq, a forthcoming feature-length documentary for which two movie producers had handed out digital video cameras to ordinary Iraqis and asked them to film their daily lives. Evidently, the Iraqis in question see things the way CPD does. Men on the streets of Baghdad discuss how nice it is to have Saddam gone and to be better paid now. One child asks his mother what she thinks of democracy. 'Hassan,' she replies to her son, 'democracy means having individual freedom.' A torture victim of Saddam says he wouldn't mind being tortured at Abu Ghraib. 'You have a nice American woman undress you and play with your penis,' he smirks. The audience laughs."

The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble
...Clearly, the war in Iraq was a drag on votes, and it is threatening to the Bush coalition," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a strategist close to the administration who had not spoken up about the war's political costs before. He contended that the war reduced Mr. Bush's majority by 6 percentage points to 51 percent of the vote.

Mr. Bush now has two years to "solve Iraq" to protect Republican candidates at the midterm elections, he said. His suggestions: withdrawing United States troops to safe citadels within Iraq or by "handing Falluja over to the Iraqis and saying, 'It's your headache.' "

On Thursday, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, issued a call to conservatives for a serious debate about the administration's foreign policy. "The consequences of the neocons' adventure in Iraq are now all too clear," he said. "America is stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight. Our military is stretched too thin to respond to other threats. And our real enemies, nonstate organizations such as Al Qaeda, are benefiting from the Arab and Islamic backlash against our occupation of an Islamic country." ...

..."A lot of the antiwar conservatives had to hold their tongue during the campaign because the No. 1 goal was to get Bush re-elected," said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an important conservative fund-raiser....

Sunday, November 07, 2004

A Generous Orthodoxy....an interview with Brian McLaren
...Next-Wave: In the book you talk about being surrounded by Christians who like the idea of the American God, and the middle-class Republican Jesus. How do you think this culture has distorted the view of lordship?

McLaren: Don't get me started on this, or I'll lapse into rant. Let me just say that I'm very very afraid of what's happening in the church in America. I'm afraid we're falling into a warrior trance, where the church baptizes the state or seeks to reclaim a kind of Constantinian power in the American empire. We're not listening to our brothers and sisters across the globe who are shocked and disappointed in our uncritical support of our government. We say we trust in the Lord, but it seems to me that our trust is pretty enmeshed with "horses and chariots" as the Psalmist said. We're succumbing to the politics of fear. We think that because we're pious---because we pray and sing and use lots of highly religious language - that we're immune to this kind of seduction, but it's happened a thousand times in history, and I think we're no less vulnerable. In fact, our wealth and power should make us more vulnerable to these seductions. As I said ... don't get me started....

Chucky's Back
...Charles Colson, you probably remember, went to prison himself for his role as one of Nixon's hatchet men in Watergate. Forget the third-rate burglary -- Colson was involved in some of the first-rate character assassinations and the dirty tricks of a dirty, vindictive administration. As he says himself, he was "willing to do almost anything for the cause of his president and his party."

But then, in prison, Colson was born again. He repented of his sins and became an ardent supporter of the church behind bars and the rights of prisoners. Prison Fellowship has grown over the years, spawning related efforts such as Justice Fellowship, which advocates reforms in the criminal justice system based on the idea of "restorative justice."

One of my biggest complaints with Colson over the past year is his failure to live up to the idea of restorative justice in his personal life. After his born-again experience, Colson reportedly apologized to many of the people he had attacked and slandered while working in Nixon's White House -- people like Daniel Ellsberg and John Kerry.

That's right, John Kerry. Richard Nixon hated and feared John Kerry's work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Colson's job was to destroy anything and anyone that Nixon hated or feared. So Colson hired John O'Neill -- the same John O'Neill who resurfaced from his crypt this year to lead the Swift Boat liars crusade -- to batter the young veteran with all the lies he could invent.

The lies and slanders thrown at John Kerry during the recent campaign were all recycled from the 30-year-old files of John O'Neill. They were concocted at Chuck Colson's direction and on Chuck Colson's payroll.

Yet the born-again Colson did not bother to make a single statement this year condemning the rebirth of his and O'Neill's filthy campaign. (Or, at least, if he did condemn O'Neill, he did so very quietly and I never heard it.)

Instead, Colson spent the year once again working in concert with people like O'Neill. He recorded pro-Bush GOTV phone messages and used his "Break Point" columns and radio commentaries as an extension of BC04 (apparently he'd finally run out of ways to paraphrase/borrow/steal from C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man).

As an ex-con and advocate of prisoner's rights, you might expect Colson to have strongly condemned the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. He did, sort of, churning out a series of "this is very bad, but ..." pieces and absolving the Pentagon and the White House of any responsibility. (The real problem, Break Point guest commentator Al Mohler said, was women in the armed forces.)...

U.S. Expands List of Lost Missiles
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 - American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.

A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, American officials said.

The officials said they did not know whether missiles from Iraq remain there or have been smuggled into other countries, though a senior administration official said Friday that "there is no evidence that they have left the country.'' ...

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Then and Now

Another map

A Day of Infamy
On November 2 Americans blew their only chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world.

The entire world is stunned by the Bush administration’s abandonment of a half century of US diplomacy in favor of misguided, unilateralist, "preemptive" naked aggression on totally false pretenses against Iraq. America’s allies are amazed at the ignorance manifested by the Bush administration. They are resentful of Bush’s "in-your-eye" attitude toward friends who warned Bush against leading America into a quagmire and giving Osama bin Laden the war he wanted.

The world was waiting hopefully for the sensible American people to rectify the ill-advised actions of a rogue neoconservative administration. Instead, Americans placed the stamp of approval on the least justifiable military action since Hitler invaded Poland.

In the eyes of the world, Bush’s reelection is proof that Ariel Sharon’s neoconsevative allies in the Bush administration speak for America after all.

The world’s sympathy for America that followed the September 11 attacks has been squandered. If the US suffers terrorist attacks in the future, the world will say that America invited the attacks and got what it asked for.

Europeans and Asians will never be able to comprehend that Bush was reelected because Americans were voting against homosexual marriage and abortion.

The world is simply unable to believe that Americans, so enamored of family values, would vote to send their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers to unprovoked war unless Americans valued empire and control over oil as more important than their family members. ...

Friday, November 05, 2004

The unteachable ignorance of the red states
I say forget introspection. It's time to be honest about our antagonists. My predecessors in this conversation are thoughtful men, and I honor their ideas, but let's try something else. I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not....

...Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

Next, they tell you that you are the best of a bad lot (humans, that is) and that as bad as you are, if you stick with them, you are among the chosen. This is flattering and reassuring, and also encourages you to imagine the terrible fates of those you envy and resent. American politicians ALWAYS operate by a similar sort of flattery, and so Americans are never induced to question themselves. That's what happened to Jimmy Carter—he asked Americans to take responsibility for their profligate ways, and promptly lost to Ronald Reagan, who told them once again that they could do anything they wanted. The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do—they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.

Third, and most important, when life grows difficult or fearsome, they (politicians, preachers, pundits) encourage you to cling to your ignorance with even more fervor. But by this time you don't need much encouragement—you've put all your eggs into the ignorance basket, and really, some kind of miraculous fruition (preferably accompanied by the torment of your enemies, and the ignorant always have plenty of enemies) is your only hope. If you are sufficiently ignorant, you won't even know how dangerous your policies are until they have destroyed you, and then you can always blame others....

Meet Bubba
...But if Democrats were sly, there is a way out. The Baptist southern presidential candidate should start a campaign to get the goddamn Federal government out of the marriage business. It has to be framed that way. Marriage should be a faith-based institution and we should turn it over to the churches. If someone doesn't want to be married in a church, then the Federal government can offer them a legal civil contract (this is a better name for it than civil union). That's not a marriage and the candidate could solemnly observe that they are taking their salvation in their own hands if they go that route, but that is their business. But marriage is sacred and the churches should be in charge of it.

If you succeeded in getting the Federal government out of the marriage business, then the whole issue would collapse on the Republicans. You appeal to populist sentiments against the Feds and to the long Baptist tradition of support for the US first amendment enshrining separation of religion and state.

But the final result would be to depoliticize gay marriage, because the Federal government wouldn't be the arena for arguing about it....

Disappointment...
Well, what is there to say? Disappointment doesn't even begin to describe it...

To the red states (and those who voted for Bush): You deserve no better- I couldn't wish worse on you if I tried. He represents you perfectly... and red really is your color. It's the color of the blood of thousands of Iraqis and by the time this four-year catastrophe in the White House is over, tousands of Americans, likely.

To the blue states (and those who were thinking when they voted): Condolences. Good luck- you'll need it. ...

Some Bush Supporters Say They Anticipate a 'Revolution'
ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 3 - Exulting in their electoral victories, President Bush's conservative supporters immediately turned to staking out mandates for an ambitious agenda of long-cherished goals, including privatizing Social Security, banning same-sex marriage, remaking the Supreme Court and overturning the court's decisions in support of abortion rights.

"Now comes the revolution," Richard Viguerie, the dean of conservative direct mail, told about a dozen fellow movement stalwarts gathered around a television here, tallying up their Senate seats in the earliest hours of the morning. "If you don't implement a conservative agenda now, when do you?"

By midday, however, fights over the spoils had already begun, as conservatives debated the electorate's verdict on the war in Iraq, the Bush administration's spending and the administration's hearty embrace of traditionalist social causes.

Conservative Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, were first in line to stake their claims, citing polls showing that a plurality of Bush supporters named "moral values" as the most important issue and arguing that a drive to ban same-sex marriage boosted turnout in Ohio.

"Make no mistake - conservative Christians and 'values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress," Mr. Viguerie wrote in a memorandum sent to other prominent conservatives. "It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this - as much as some will try," he said, underlining the final clause....

...By all accounts, the war in Iraq only hindered Mr. Bush's re-election, renewing debate among conservatives over its wisdom, especially during the hours on Tuesday when early polls suggested that Mr. Bush might be headed for defeat. "We need a major national debate on, what kind of foreign policy is this country going to have?" said Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and now chairman of the Free Congress Foundation. "Are we going to continue on the offense, where we make more enemies than we can defeat? Or are we going to return to the traditional foreign policy that we do not attack unless attacked?"...

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Court Gives Election to Bush
Once again, it appears that a Supreme Court ruling gave the election to George Bush. In this case, it was the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which issued a ruling that Massachusetts' failure to recognize gay marriage was unconstitutional.

People who want to sound smugly knowledgable about chaos theory will tell the story of a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a storm. In the 2004 election, that butterfly was the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Their ruling on gay marriage stoked fears among religious conservatives. This inflated the religious conservative vote, helping President Bush and hurting the candidate from Massachusetts. I interpret the election returns not as a mandate for America's tough stand on terror or for privatizing Social Security. This election was a rebuke to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. If they had not out-ed the gay marriage issue, then the result of the election, for better or worse, would have been different....

Gay Marriage, GOP Secret Weapon
Was the "moral value" of homophobia this election’s X-factor?

My colleague Ann and I decided to tune out of the election coverage around 1:30 am. We left the friends with whom we’d been watching to walk to the F train the long way, crosstown and down Sixth Avenue through Greenwich Village. At W. 4th, a man staggered toward us from across the street. He looked drunk; he was dirty; and he wore an American flag t-shirt that didn’t come close to covering his belly.

“Admit it, Democrat,” he bellowed, closing fast. “Bush won!” He shook a fist at us. “And now I’m gonna shove my whole f-----g fist up your Democrat ass!”

I had two inches on the guy. Ann, half a foot shorter than me and probably half as heavy, knows karate. We figured we could protect our unaffiliated asses. The real puzzle was, Why did this man think we were Democrats? And what was with the weirdly homoerotic anger? There’s something about threatening to shove your “whole fist” up an ass that suggests a certain familiarity with the sexual practice of fisting and its challenges.

We thought about it while we waited for the F train. Ann, as it happens, had voted for Kerry. Since I didn’t vote -- my registration is two or three apartments behind me -- I don’t need to say who I would’ve voted for if I had. We inspected our clothing: Ann looked sharp in a neat black outfit and short, bright red hair. I felt stylistically nonpartisan in jeans and a sweatshirt. Both of our bellies, however, were fully covered, unlike the fister’s. That fact, apparently, revealed both our political and sexual proclivities.

At first, we didn't make much of the man's warning. After all, it’s easy to imagine that had the election gone differently, and had we been in, say, Dallas, a bare-bellied Kerry supporter might have likewise threatened a fisting.

Or maybe not. Homophobia is a cross-party persuasion, but last night it figured most often in the votes of Republicans. A topic discussed more and more frequently as the pundits came to realize that their predictions had been wildly wrong was “values” -- that is, in this election like no other, gay marriage. Let’s make that simpler, get to the root of the matter: gay sex. Gay sex in all its variety -- including fisting -- may have been this election’s X-factor. Bush is against it. Kerry would rather leave the details to the discretion of lovers.

The clearest evidence of homosexuality as an organizing principle in last night’s voting is the fact that all eleven of the state gay marriage bans proposed passed. The proposals may not have been so much populist as political from conception, designed by GOP strategists to drive otherwise lazy, Republican-leaning voters to the polls. Given the accounts of fraudulent phone calls “campaigning” for Kerry’s promise to legalize gay marriage (a promise he never made; like Bush, he’s for civil unions), that’s not a hard story to swallow. ...

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

Forum: The truth of the matter
John Bugay: Christians should be alarmed by Bush

If you're a conservative Christian, and you're still undecided, please consider that evangelical Christians who hope to call this country to a higher moral standard are on the verge of undermining their own legitimacy.

I am a Christian, and I am alarmed. One of the values we hold most dearly is "truth." It is a foundational value, upon which all other values rest. If we don't have truth, we have built our house on shifting sand.

When President Clinton looked into the camera and said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," we discerned what he was saying and were justifiably outraged. Just a few years later, President Bush looked the world in the eye and said there was "clear evidence" of peril in Iraq, the result of which "could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Even then, the evidence was not so clear at all. And yet President Bush invoked this false image, intending to frighten people into going to war.

Clinton's untruth brought scorn and derision only upon himself. But Bush's untruth plunged this nation into an unnecessary war, killing thousands of innocents and costing all of us the good will of people and governments around the world. Who will ever trust this president again?...

...President Bush has governed and gone to war through policies that deliberately suppress the truth. Christians who support a president who engages in this kind of subterfuge have already judged themselves guilty of the very thing they ought to stand against....

Killing for Christ
The Destructive Power of Faith

...I have heard these men, both Bush and Kerry, attest to their deep rooted religious principles, the depth of their faith in the teachings of Jesus, comforting the citizenry that they are fit for the White House because they believe. But I see nothing of Jesus in their behavior, nothing of the compassion that attended his ministry, nothing of the inclusiveness of his teachings, nothing of the love he proffered as the binding source of peace throughout the world.

I look in vain for this Christ in the Christianity practiced by the right wing, fanatical sects that preach the Book of Revelation, reveling in the glory they perceive to be their reward if they destroy the enemies they identify as the enemies of God. I wonder where in this acclaimed Christian land of TV Evangelists and literalist ministers is there a man who acts as Christ would act? I see none. I see only a God forsaken Tele-Evangelist land of vitriol and bigotry where none could say I "love the Lord my God with my whole heart and mind and soul, and my neighbor as myself." They have buried the teachings of Jesus in the quagmire of a malevolent and malicious God of the Old Testament, a God that would order one Semitic tribe to exterminate another. We have not moved beyond the racist hatred that blotted the landscape 2500 years ago....

Conflicted Evangelicals Could Cost Bush Votes
BROOKFIELD, Wis. — With their ardent, Bible-based opposition to abortion and gay marriage, evangelical Christians are a key target of the massive Republican get-out-the-vote drive heading into next week's election. Party leaders consider conservative Christians to be as near a lock for President Bush (news - web sites) as any group can be.

But GOP strategists might want to have a chat with Tim Moore, an evangelical who teaches civics at a traditional Christian school near Milwaukee. He shares Bush's religious convictions, but says the president has lost his vote because of tax cuts for the wealthy and the administration's shifting rationales for invading Iraq (news - web sites).

"There's no way I'm going for Bush. That much I know," said Moore, 46. ...

... Others are like Joe Urcavich, pastor of the nondenominational evangelical Green Bay Community Church, where more than 2,000 people worship each Sunday. He is undecided, troubled by the bloodshed in the Middle East.

"It's hard for me to say that Christians should be marching against abortion and carrying signs, and then turn around and giving a pep rally for the war in Iraq without even contemplating that hundreds and hundreds of people are being killed on a regular basis over there," Urcavich said.

"I'm very antiabortion, but the reality is the right to life encompasses a much broader field than just abortion," he added. "If I'm a proponent of life, I have to think about the consequences of not providing prescription drugs to seniors or sending young men off to war."

That kind of talk, coming from a conservative Christian who might ordinarily be inclined to vote Republican, could portend trouble for Bush. ...

Why Are Some American Christians So Bloodthirsty?
Understanding Pro-war Christians' Indifference to Civilian Deaths

...But no matter how bad it gets, nothing seems to change Americans' support for war, which for some reason is stiffest among Christian supporters of the Bush administration. "Stuff happens in a war zone." "Don't worry because God is in control." With these and other slogans, I've been reassured by countless pro-war Christians that, as long as civilians aren't intentionally targeted, taking their lives is okay, maybe even predestined, God's will.

Recently a Christian from Australia wrote to ask, "Why are American Christians so bloodthirsty? Why do they support the war in Iraq, no matter how many innocent people are made to suffer? We just don't understand why they're willing to kill other people so that they can feel more safe – it's so selfish!"

She's right, and she's wrong. She's right about the fact that many Christians in America will blindly support whichever war their president promotes, with the assumption that his much-advertised praying guarantees us that God approves of all those bombs and missiles, and even the inevitable collateral damage.

This "don't worry, be happy" stance of pro-war Christians can make those of us who suffer at the news of civilian deaths almost green with envy: How do they go blithely to church, pray and give an offering, then go eat some nice mashed potatoes and gravy at Cracker Barrel with nary a worry about the families being bombed or shot or crushed by their own military at that very moment?...

...But most importantly, conservative Christianity in the U.S. has succumbed to that which it has, in decades past, most rigorously warned against: moral relativism. By restricting any discussion of morality to sexual behavior, right-wing politicians have obliterated the once-central Christian teaching that the way we treat others is of paramount importance to God. Cleverly "working the room," pro-war politicians have infiltrated churches to such a degree that killings and torture are no longer within the province of morality. When morality is only about sex, no aspect of war – even the killing of entire families – can arouse criticism, much less condemnation.

In short, everything that happens in the execution of war, even that which is flagrantly in violation of the moral values that Jesus taught regarding violence and revenge, prayer for enemies and peacemaking, becomes acceptable when Jesus' teachings are compartmentalized as relevant only in our personal lives. When Jesus is sidelined, those parts of the Bible that support authority, no matter what it does to innocent people, will take precedence. This is what has happened (often with the prodding, political influence and financial support of right-wing political organizations) in many of our churches today. Unless Christians begin to speak up publicly for the teachings of Christ – the cornerstone of our faith – we will continue to slide into the kind of moral relativism that causes others to wonder why we are so bloodthirsty.

Using My Religion
How Faith-Based Politicking Degrades Democracy and Christianity

...Throughout this long and torturous presidential campaign, something has been causing many Americans of good will to feel uneasy, fidget, or get up to make a snack: the sometimes solemn, often cynically manipulative insertion of "faith" into virtually every campaign speech and political discussion. Rock'em-sock-em Christian candidates trade holier-than-thou barbs and jabber endlessly about that poor exhausted word "faith", all in an effort to prove who's got the biggest pipeline to God. Faith-based politicking is the crowd-pleasing campaign smartbomb that's supposed to blast through every ounce of reason in our heads, and pretty much force us to vote for whichever man wins that round. It works because it scares people, particularly religious people: As the thinking goes, and the chain emails filling Christian voters, inboxes shout, Dare you cast a vote against the Almighty?

Implying that one's values, "character", and decisions come straight from God, hence are inerrant and infallible, is a timeless and shameless trick to short-circuit questions and prevail over others. But when politicians get into this bad habit, Americans, including those of us residing in the much-courted and much-maligned "evangelical bloc", sense that something is terribly amiss.

While Christians of every denomination are viewed by political strategists as mere sheep to be herded this way and that, many of us are not fooled by all the threats that we'd better vote for George W. Bush if we want to take communion or get to heaven. We know, deep in our hearts and minds, that our democracy AND our religion are tainted when preachers tell us how to vote rather than how to be better Christians.

And those of us who were raised in evanglical churches are especially suspicious--though we may not say so for fear of making our neighbors or family members angry--when candidates claim to be spokesmen for God, or imply that they're something even more....

The Soundtrack of Right Now
Imagine it pouring, it's raining down on us
Mosh pits outside the oval office
Someone's tryina tell us something,
Maybe this is god just sayin' we're responsible
For this monster, this coward,
That we have empowered...
--Eminem, "Mosh"

...Right or wrong, Eminem has grabbed the prophetic mantle like no other musician or writer in America right now (no living journalist need apply). But he's no messiah -- he's grabbed the mantle and turned it into black hoodies for everyone....

Monday, November 01, 2004

...At the outset, I said I decided this week that Mr. Bush had made the world a more dangerous place with his unilateral decisions, I had to add in the news that came from the IAEA about the disappearance of 380 tons of weapons from a cache 30 miles from Baghdad. Senator Kerry has sharply criticized President Bush for not securing this arms depot from looters. Vice President Cheney responded by pointing out that since the war ended, 400,000 tons of weapons have been destroyed. Cheney misses the point, and in a way so has Mr. Kerry, by saying the missing explosives no doubt have been used to kill American troops with roadside bombs. The reason the IAEA got involved in the 380 tons and not the other 400,000 is that the small cache contained explosives capable of setting off nuclear weapons. It is a far more serious problem than Kerry realizes.

When President Bush 18 months ago indicated he no longer trusted the IAEA inspection regime and would have our forces disarm Saddam, the IAEA inspectors left Iraq and have not returned since. As soon as the war formally ended last year, the IAEA asked U.S. permission to return to secure those sites that contained dual-use materials that could be used for WMD purposes. The Al Qaqaa site near Baghdad was one of them, containing HMX and RDX explosives of the type a terrorist would have to have in order to set off a nuke in an attack. As Gordon Prather explained to me when he learned of the missing explosives: If a terrorist group were to get their hands on 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium, it would be relatively easy for them to make a nuke of Hiroshima power. They could, say, load it into a truck and cart it into Washington on Inauguration Day. But without HMX or RDX, they could not detonate the nuke, and it would be impossible for terrorists to make the explosives suitable for the triggering device on their own. The process is more complex than making the nuke.

What Prather fears is that Iraqi scientists had already cast some of the HMX into the lenses needed in such a device, lenses the IAEA had under its control and seal, and that these are now loose in the region. “Can you imagine, the IAEA had nuclear materials in Iraq under seal dating back to the 1970s and none of the seals were broken even during the Gulf War. It was our responsibility to secure those sites as soon as we went in and instead looters have carted them off. Amazing.”

By this time, with one revelation after another of the mismanagement of foreign policy and national security under President Bush, I’d hoped he would find a way to signal the electorate that things would be different in a second term; that would require a change in personnel at the top. It would have meant Dick Cheney’s replacement with a GOP internationalist. It would also have meant a clean sweep of the neo-cons who cooked up the war -- and who misled a President who did not have the experience to be able to figure out he had been manipulated into realizing their imperial fantasies. Sadly, there is no indication a second term would be any different than a first, as all the speculation we read on personnel still has Cheney in the driver’s seat with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld readily at hand.

Because Mr. Bush has told us repeatedly about how he is strengthened by his faith in God, with that faith sustaining him through his tough decisions, it goes without saying that it he is re-elected he will be filled with the spirit of vindication. There not only would be no changes in the team’s view of how the world must be dealt with. There would also be less restraint in George W. Bush's willingness to shape the world to his divinely inspired vision....

Down with the Kerry haters
Oct. 30, 2004 | COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Lisa Dupler, a 33-year-old from Columbus, held up a rainbow-striped John Kerry sign outside the Nationwide Arena on Friday, as Republicans streamed out after being rallied by George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A thickset woman with very short, dark hair, Dupler was silent and barely flinched as people passing her hissed "faggot" into her ear. An old lady looked at her and said, "You people are sick!" A kid who looked to be about 10 or 11 affected a limp wrist and mincing voice and said, "Oh, I'm gay." Rather than restraining him, his squat mother guffawed and then turned to Dupler and sneered, "Why don't you go marry your girlfriend?" Encouraged, her son yelled, "We don't want faggots in the White House!"...

..."Jesus! Jesus!" screamed 26-year-old Joe Robles, pointing to his Bush-Cheney sign. "The man stands for God," he said of the president. "We want somebody who stands for Jesus. I always vote my Christian morals." Robles, a student at Ohio State University, told me that Kerry's daughter is a lesbian. I said I thought that was Dick Cheney's daughter, but he shook his head no with confidence.

Robles said that Kerry would make it illegal for preachers to say that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. In California, he informed me gravely, such preaching has been deemed a hate crime, and pastors who indulge in it are fined $25,000, which "goes to lesbians."...

GIs Lack Armor, Radios, Bullets
(CBS) Two weeks ago, a group of Army reservists in Iraq refused a direct order to go on a dangerous operation to re-supply another unit with jet fuel.

Without helicopter gunships to escort them over a treacherous stretch of highway, and lacking armored vehicles, soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company called it a suicide mission.

The Army called it an isolated incident, a temporary breakdown in discipline, and an investigation is underway.

But the 343rd isn't the first outfit to be put in harm's way without proper equipment, and commanders in Iraq acknowledged that the unit's concerns were legitimate, even if their mutiny was not.

With a $400 billion defense budget you might think U.S. troops have everything they need to fight the war, but that's not always the case. ...

...
Winslow Wheeler, a long time Capitol Hill staffer who spent years writing and reviewing defense appropriations bills, thinks he knows one reason why those shortages exist, after looking at the current Defense budget. Army accounts that pay for training, maintenance and repairs are being raided by Congress to pay for pork-barrel spending.

Wheeler says $2.8 billion that was earmarked for operations and maintenance to support U.S. troops has been used to "pay the pork bill."

Wheeler, who has written a book called "The Wastrels of Defense," says congressmen routinely hide billions of dollars in pet projects in the defense bill.

And buried in the back of this one, Wheeler found a biathlon jogging track in Alaska, a brown tree snake eradication program in Hawaii, a parade ground maintenance contract for a military base that closed years ago, and money for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration.

By law, these projects can't be cut, so Pentagon bookkeepers will have to dip into operations and maintenance accounts to pay for them.

"They do all kinds of things that adds up to: 'We're basically eating our own young to support the war,'" he says....

AMERICA’S CULTURE WARS: In Search of a Third Way
The upcoming election between George W. Bush and John Kerry is likely to be one of the most divisive presidential elections in American history. A major reason for this divisiveness is the ongoing culture wars in America reflecting a deeply polarized church.

The polarization in the American church is between those on the politically-correct left in a number of mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches and the religious right that is clearly the most influential force in the American evangelical movement.

Those on the politically-correct left are a small but increasingly influential group within mainline churches. Of course Christians in mainline protestant and Catholic churches reflect a broad range of political views. Those who are a part of these churches are working for a number of causes that Christians from many traditions can affirm, including their concern for the poor, environmental stewardship, and racial justice. However, the politically-correct left tends to work to support the political advocacy of the most progressive edge of the Democratic Party. Some from this group demonize the religious right in order to secure support for agendas advocating individual choice regarding reproduction and sexual-preference issues.

The religious right comprises a major movement within American evangelicalism. A number of issues expressed by evangelicals and those on the religious right could also be affirmed by Christians from many other traditions, including the concern for the integrity of families, moral behavior in society, and religious liberty. However, those who are a part of the religious right are very nationalistic and tend to support the views of the most conservative side of the Republican Party. As leaders in the religious right promote agendas not only to limit abortion and gay marriage but to cut back government funding for many of the social programs that serve those at the margins, they often demonize those on the other end of the political spectrum. One frequently hears the mantra on Christian radio regarding the threat posed by a small elite group of liberals, secular humanists, and feminists in Washington DC who they accuse of seeking to destroy the Christian family, our basic freedoms such as the right to bear arms, and everything else that many evangelicals care about.

Christine and I work regularly with evangelicals and charismatic Christians in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and a number of other countries. Curiously, we have yet to find there anything equivalent to America’s culture wars. We typically find that, in these countries, Christians from opposite ends of the theological spectrum often work together on social programs for the needy and on political advocacy for a number of legislative initiatives.

Nor have we found anything that approximates the American religious right anywhere else in the world. In fact evangelicals in these countries tend to be all over the road map politically. They don’t feel an obligation to be a part of either the political right or left. However, they generally tend to be more progressive in their political views than their American counterparts. And they are put off by American evangelicals who are inclined to confuse the agendas of the kingdom with the agenda of the United States....

The war on Iraq has made moral cowards of us all
More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage?

The full scale of the human cost already paid for the war on Iraq is only now becoming clear. Last week's estimate by investigators, using credible methodology, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians - most of them women and children - have died since the US-led invasion is a profound moral indictment of our countries. The US and British governments quickly moved to cast doubt on the Lancet medical journal findings, citing other studies. These mainly media-based reports put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at about 15,000 - although the basis for such an endorsement is unclear, since neither the US nor the UK admits to collecting data on Iraqi civilian casualties.

Civilian deaths have always been a tragic reality of modern war. But the conflict in Iraq was supposed to be different - US and British forces were dispatched to liberate the Iraqi people, not impose their own tyranny of violence.

Reading accounts of the US-led invasion, one is struck by the constant, almost casual, reference to civilian deaths....

...We invaded Iraq to free Iraqis from a dictator who, by some accounts, oversaw the killing of about 300,000 of his subjects - although no one has been able to verify more than a small fraction of the figure. If it is correct, it took Saddam decades to reach such a horrific statistic. The US and UK have, it seems, reached a third of that total in just 18 months.

Meanwhile, the latest scandal over missing nuclear-related high explosives in Iraq (traced and controlled under the UN inspections regime) only underscores the utter deceitfulness of the Bush-Blair argument for the war. Having claimed the uncertainty surrounding Iraq's WMD capability constituted a threat that could not go unchallenged in a post-9/11 world, one would have expected the two leaders to insist on a military course of action that brought under immediate coalition control any aspect of potential WMD capability, especially relating to any possible nuclear threat. That the US military did not have a dedicated force to locate and neutralise these explosives underscores the fact that both Bush and Blair knew that there was no threat from Iraq, nuclear or otherwise.

Of course, the US and Britain have a history of turning a blind eye to Iraqi suffering when it suits their political purposes. During the 1990s, hundreds of thousands are estimated by the UN to have died as a result of sanctions. Throughout that time, the US and the UK maintained the fiction that this was the fault of Saddam Hussein, who refused to give up his WMD. We now know that Saddam had disarmed and those deaths were the responsibility of the US and Britain, which refused to lift sanctions.

There are many culpable individuals and organisations history will hold to account for the war - from deceitful politicians and journalists to acquiescent military professionals and silent citizens of the world's democracies. As the evidence has piled up confirming what I and others had reported - that Iraq was already disarmed by the late 1990s - my personal vote for one of the most culpable individuals would go to Hans Blix, who headed the UN weapons inspection team in the run-up to war. He had the power if not to prevent, at least to forestall a war with Iraq. Blix knew that Iraq was disarmed, but in his mealy-mouthed testimony to the UN security council helped provide fodder for war. His failure to stand up to the lies used by Bush and Blair to sell the Iraq war must brand him a moral and intellectual coward.

But we all are moral cowards when it comes to Iraq. Our collective inability to summon the requisite shame and rage when confronted by an estimate of 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians in the prosecution of an illegal and unjust war not only condemns us, but adds credibility to those who oppose us....