The Limited Modified Hangout

Towing the lion since June 2003.

Friday, December 31, 2004

Ansar al-Sunna and 2 other guerrilla groups in Iraq have threatened to kill anyone participating in what they termed "the farce" of Iraqi elections.

CNN is reporting that all 700 voter registration workers in Mosul have resigned after death threats. The guerrillas are alleging that the secular process of American-sponsored elections will result in un-Islamic laws. I don't see how Mosul can participate in the election under these conditions. It has a population of about a million....

...Candidate name recognition doesn't appear very important, however. For security reasons, the actual names of most candidates on the 78 party or multiparty lists have so far not been released. This odd situation, in which the candidates are not known amonth before the election, attests to how dire the political and security situation in Iraq really is.

Head Scarves Now a Protective Accessory in Iraq
Fearing for Their Safety, Muslim and Christian Women Alike Cover Up Before They Go Out

...The whole point of wearing the scarves now was to be anonymous and unimportant, to avoid being singled out and followed, or kidnapped, or shot. It was more than a matter of blending in. It was a matter of disappearing into the landscape.

"I put on the scarf because I wanted to walk in the street without fearing someone will kill me or kidnap me," said one of the women. " I want to finish my studies. Without the scarf I cannot. I heard rumors about killing women without a scarf. Why should I risk my life?"

This is the new reality for many women in Iraq, Muslims and Christians alike. As the months have passed since the U.S.-led invasion, fewer women are daring to venture out without wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf, called a hejab in Arabic. In Baghdad, moderate Muslim women used to feel they had a choice whether to wear the scarf, even as religious oppression under Saddam Hussein grew over the past decade. Now, in many neighborhoods, it is hard to find a woman outdoors without a head scarf....

...Although Iraq is predominantly Muslim, for many decades its capital was a trendy, modern city. In the 1960s, women wore short skirts and blouses with low necklines. But their daughters say they do not have such freedom today. They blame a postwar insurgency bolstered by conservative hard-liners.

"Because of the current situation in the country, lack of security, the occupation and many other things, people started to look for a way to escape the terror," said Fadhil Shaker, a psychology professor at Baghdad University. "They want to hide or take shelter to protect themselves. For women, the scarf is the best way to protect them. Women believe the scarf will be the wall to prevent people from looking at them."

Before the war, Iraqi Christian women rarely put on scarves. There was no reason to do so, according to Christian women interviewed recently. Their religion did not dictate it, Muslims and Christians in Iraq got along peacefully and they said they felt no pressure to blend in. Even a few months ago, the sight of a Christian woman without a scarf or a Catholic nun in a habit was not uncommon in neighborhoods where Christians gathered.

But these days Iraqi society feels like it has lost its social compact, its religious tolerance, many of the women said. Christians feel singled out. Anyone associated with the Americans, any foreign military force or the interim government feels singled out.

Nada, a student who declined to give her last name, said the first day she went to college this fall, her mother rushed out of the house at the last moment and presented her with a scarf. She had never worn one.

Female students at Baghdad University now debate whether women should wear the scarves. Some wear them for religious reasons. But most who have recently adopted the practice have done so simply out of fear. ...

Thursday, December 30, 2004

‘Religion is Morally Neutral’
Desmond Tutu discusses the tsunami tragedy, God, Iraq and the re-election of George W. Bush

...You said George Bush should admit that he made a mistake. Were you surprised at his re-election?
[Laughs] I still can't believe that it really could have happened. Just look at the facts on the table: He’d gone into a war having misled people—whether deliberately or not—about why he went to war. You would think that would have knocked him out [of the race.] It didn’t. Look at the number of American soldiers who have died since he claimed that the war had ended. And yet it seems this doesn't make most Americans worry too much. I was teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., [during the election campaign] and I was shocked, because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here [during apartheid]—vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view.

Do you see any other parallels with white-ruled South Africa?
Look at the [detentions in] Guantanamo Bay. You say, why do you detain people without trial in the fashion that you have done? And when they give the answer security, you say no, no, no, this can't be America. This is what we used to hear in South Africa. It's unbelievable that a country that many of us have looked to as the bastion of true freedom could now have eroded so many of the liberties we believed were upheld almost religiously. [But] feeling as devastated in many ways as I am, it is wonderful to find that there are [also] Americans who have felt very strongly [about administration policies]—the people who turned out for rallies against the war. One always has to be very careful not to do what we used to do here, where you generalize very facilely, and one has to remember that there are very many Americans who are feeling deeply distressed about what has taken place in their country. We take our hats off to them.

Talking about religion, much has been said about the role it played in the White House race. What do you say to those who believe that Bush was chosen by God?
[Laughs] I keep having to remind people that religion in and of itself is morally neutral. Religion is like a knife. When you use a knife for cutting up bread to prepare sandwiches, a knife is good. If you use the same knife to stick into somebody’s guts, a knife is bad. Religion in and of itself is not good or bad—it is what it makes you do… Frequently, fundamentalists will say this person is the anointed of God if the particular person is supporting their own positions on for instance, homosexuality, or abortion. [I] feel so deeply saddened [about it]. Do you really believe that the Jesus who was depicted in the Scriptures as being on the side of those who were vilified, those who were marginalized, that this Jesus would actually be supporting groups that clobber a group that is already persecuted? That’s a Christ I would not worship. I'm glad that I believe very fervently that Jesus would not be on the side of gay bashers. To think that people say, as they used to say, that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. Abominable. Abominable....

Legal Breach: The Government's Attorneys and Abu Ghraib
The most obvious victims of the brutal treatment of prisoners at American military jails are the men, women and children who have been humiliated, sexually assaulted, beaten, tortured and even killed. But, as in all wars, the Bush administration's assault on the Geneva Conventions has caused collateral damage - in this case, to the legal offices of the executive branch and the military.

To get around the inconvenience of the Geneva Conventions, the administration twisted the roles of the legal counsels of the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department beyond recognition. Once charged with giving unvarnished advice about whether political policies remained within the law, the Bush administration's legal counsels have been turned into the sort of cynical corporate lawyers who figure out how to make something illegal seem kosher - or at least how to minimize the danger of being held to account....

Never Smile at a Crocodile
How to avoid holiday arguments with pro-war relatives
Part II
...We who are opposed to the downward direction that our country's been taking already know this; we've seen it for ourselves. We've seen the sentimental photos of Bush standing beside Christian crosses, American flags, church pews, even halo-shaped seals. We've seen him wearing various outfits that trigger nostalgic memories of past wars and military honors. We've heard the stirring patriotic music on every newscast and seen the adoring faces of anchors, journalists, and embedded reporters who were, in bygone days, duty-bound to critique the president, but are now obliged to keep him looking good....

...When you see their W, Bush/Cheney 2004, Power of Pride, Let's Roll, and obligatory flag bumper stickers, it can be disconcerting and more than a little depressing.

These are signals not merely of opinions, but of identity. And that's where the problem lies – you can't argue a person out of his or her identity. As most of us have learned the hard way, you should never try to convince a Republican that he's a Democrat, a pacifist that she's pro-war, or a hard worker that he's a lazy bum.

Because they run deep, identities are defended tooth and nail. With the aid of sophisticated marketing techniques, the Bush campaign has made sure from the very start that support for this president wouldn't be rational – that is, based on bald facts that can easily be supported or rejected. No longer would the Republicans leave their dominance of this country to chance. To maintain support for their policies even when the terrible consequences became apparent, they'd need something a lot more reliable – they'd need us to feel as if our very identities hinge on Mr. Bush being infallible: if he's wrong, we're wrong. If he's shamed, we're shamed. If we stand by him, we're standing by us.

The "conservative" GOP that took over the U.S. in 2000 and again this year has never strayed from its original strategy: creating a new, godlike role for the presidency and a new Christian/moral/patriotic identity for the American people.

Everyone in the Bush administration and its media understands the overarching goal: to craft and continually reinforce an identity based on known demographics, religious beliefs, prejudices, and fears, an identity that would be "sticky" and contagious. This identity would prevent mistakes from mattering to Americans because they'd no longer be thinking in terms of facts, but in terms of their self-image and the way their neighbors see them. ...

...There is a sense of unreality in America today, thanks to the success of the Bush strategists' ongoing identity campaign. I've worked with many abused children, some of them horribly traumatized, who cling to the abusive parent with great zeal because "he's my father" or "I'm her daughter." For abusive families, this may be adaptive in the long run because this "irrational" bonding and refusal to criticize buys time, time in which both parties can heal and mature.

But sometimes the fear of losing one's identity as "loyal child," or of losing one's parent's identity as "loving Dad" or "gentle Mother," keeps the whole family stuck in destructive patterns and year-in, year-out misery. The inability to jeopardize those identities by saying "I'm his son and I love him, but he's violent and I won't allow him to abuse me anymore" prohibits clear thinking and ruins lives.

The Bush folks understand this dynamic, which is why they've played on it from the beginning. Some insightful writers have begun explaining how Bush's identity as the strict-but-benevolent father, the representative of Christianity, and the ultimate patriot was designed to marginalize dissent and elicit obedience, submissiveness, and unquestioning support. ...

...A pillar of the Bush/war supporter's identity is what I call "identity imagery." When we who are antiwar think of the phrase "War on Terror" or the word "Iraq," non-identity fact-based images flood our minds: photos of bombed hospitals, infant corpses, bloodied soldiers, and weeping relatives. Say the very same words to a Bush supporter, and he or she will see images of identity: President Bush praying in church or speaking to his troops in military garb, and themselves – the "true" patriotic, Christian Americans – standing up for a victimized but noble nation.

For someone who sees the latter images – which anyone relying on mainstream news and commentary naturally will – hearing your arguments against the war will conjure up the opposite images: unpatriotic, un-Christian, unpopular, and – this is critical – unsafe. Right now the terrorist threat is mainly "over there," but the threat of social ostracism or worse is right here, so it is far more influential on American opinion. ...

Book tackles tough questions about the Kingdom of Christ
..."Evangelical theologies of the Kingdom have led to two polar opposite approaches to political engagement: withdrawal or triumphalism," Moore said.

"One side persistently calls on evangelicals to withdraw from the public square and prepare for the coming of Christ. It beckons evangelicals to an alternative universe of evangelical sub-culture -- a 'Bizarro America' where evangelicals have our own distinctly Christian popular culture, complete with Christian boy bands, Christian cartoon television networks, and Christian romance novels.

"On the other hand, some evangelicals have spoken as though America could be 'claimed' for Christ through enacting 'Christian' political legislation -- complete with a 'Christian' view on everything from congressional term limits to the line item veto. These evangelicals have often vested political processes with so much hope that they are befuddled when political victories fail to stem the tide of the sexual revolution or the abortion culture."...

MAGINOT MINDS IN WASHINGTON GLOSS OVER THE TRUTH IN IRAQ

...ut in only the last two weeks, American generals and civilian officials are, in fact, admitting that they have their own similar Maginot Line problems. In Mosul, the Iraqi police force has "faded away." American generals speak of a "virtual connectivity" of the insurgents never seen before, as they use the Internet to pass along techniques, tactics and advice to one another. American generals now admit that almost all of them are Iraqis; we have created the Iraqi terrorists who were not there before.

Take only the astoundingly candid analysis, based in part on an interview with Gen. John Abizaid, the senior U.S. military commander in the region, by CNN's excellent Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr, on television last Sunday.

Starr reported: "Senior U.S. military sources in the region tell CNN the city of Mosul has been wracked by violence for weeks. Local Iraqi security forces have virtually melted away, say those officials. One senior U.S. officer tells CNN, we have no Iraqi police force up in Mosul today.

"The problem in getting Iraqis to fight the insurgency may be deeper across Iraq. The military assessment now is that the U.S. miscalculated Iraqi tribal and religious loyalties and did not realize Iraqis are likely to fight only for their brethren ... So in cases like Mosul, they simply will not fight the intimidation of the insurgents, the U.S. now believes."

And remember, until now Mosul was one of our success stories! ...

... The truth no one really wants to deal with is that this war could very easily be lost by the United States. All the insurgents have to do is hang on another year. All we have to do is what the French and the British did in their colonies: Let themselves be exhausted and finally destroyed by their hubris, their delusions and their arrogant lack of understanding of the local people.

Our Maginot Lines today are our satellites, our huge bombers, our willingness to destroy a city such as Fallujah without even knowing who's there. Our Maginot minds refuse to see that the Germans sneaking around the French through Belgium to destroy them is disturbingly analogous to the insurgents in Iraq moving in cells from city to city and letting us think we are "winning."

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Iraq 2004 Looks Like Vietnam 1966
Adjusting body counts for medical and military changes.

...After factoring in medical, doctrinal, and technological improvements, infantry duty in Iraq circa 2004 comes out just as intense as infantry duty in Vietnam circa 1966—and in some cases more lethal. Even discrete engagements, such as the battle of Hue City in 1968 and the battles for Fallujah in 2004, tell a similar tale: Today's grunts are patrolling a battlefield every bit as deadly as the crucible their fathers faced in Southeast Asia....

...The Hue comparison is illuminating. In Hue, three Marine battalions (roughly 3,000 men) plunged into a vicious house-to-house fight with 12,000 North Vietnamese, ultimately routing them after suffering harsh losses. In April 2004, three Marine battalions attacked several thousand terrorists in Fallujah and were days away from taking the city when the White House called off the attack. In November, three new Marine battalions joined two Army mechanized infantry battalions in a sweeping attack to retake the city. They succeeded, although outbreaks of fighting continue. While the North Vietnamese fought a coordinated defensive battle for Hue City until they were annihilated, the terrorists in Fallujah fought in small packs, hiding among the tens of thousands of structures in the "city of mosques." In the three-week battle for Hue, 147 Marines were killed and 857 wounded. In the twin battles for Fallujah, more than 104 soldiers and Marines have been killed and more than 1,100 wounded in a battle that will continue to take lives, like the three Marines who encountered yet another pocket of fighters last week.

Hue and Fallujah provide one of the best generational comparisons of combat because both battles unfolded similarly. Without controlling for any of the advances in medical technology, medical evacuation, body armor, or military technology, U.S. losses in Fallujah almost equal those of Hue. If you factor in the improvements in medical technology alone, then the fight for Fallujah was just as costly (or maybe more so) as that for Hue, as measured by the number of mortal wounds sustained by U.S. troops....

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Gemini: (May 21—June 21)
Although it was fun to hear your name on television, you still don't think the president should use the State Of The Union address to put prices on citizens' heads.

Cancer: (June 22—July 22)
Learning to accept change is a sign of maturity. Enjoy spending your golden years begging for it on the corner.

God isn't a member of my party, He just commands everything my party stands for:
FIRST-PERSON: Election day & America’s future
Thursday, Oct 28, 2004
By Rick Warren

...But for those of us who accept the Bible as God's Word and know that God has a unique, sovereign purpose for every life, I believe there are five issues that are non-negotiable. To me, they’re not even debatable because God's Word is clear on these issues. In order to live a purpose-driven life -- to affirm what God has clearly stated about His purpose for every person He creates -- we must take a stand by finding out what the candidates believe about these five issues, and then vote accordingly.

Here are five questions to ask when considering who to vote for in this election:

1. What does each candidate believe about abortion and protecting the lives of unborn children?

2. What does each candidate believe about using unborn babies for stem cell harvesting?

3. What does each candidate believe about homosexual “marriage”?

4. What does each candidate believe about human cloning?

5. What does each candidate believe about euthanasia -- the killing of the elderly and the invalids?...

God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat.
Sojourners

...We believe that poverty - caring for the poor and vulnerable - is a religious issue. Do the candidates' budget and tax policies reward the rich or show compassion for poor families? Do their foreign policies include fair trade and debt cancellation for the poorest countries? (Matthew 25:35-40, Isaiah 10:1-2)

We believe that the environment - caring for God's earth - is a religious issue. Do the candidates' policies protect the creation or serve corporate interests that damage it? (Genesis 2:15, Psalm 24:1)

We believe that war - and our call to be peacemakers - is a religious issue. Do the candidates' policies pursue "wars of choice" or respect international law and cooperation in responding to real global threats? (Matthew 5:9)

We believe that truth-telling is a religious issue. Do the candidates tell the truth in justifying war and in other foreign and domestic policies? (John 8:32)

We believe that human rights - respecting the image of God in every person - is a religious issue. How do the candidates propose to change the attitudes and policies that led to the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners? (Genesis 1:27)

We believe that our response to terrorism is a religious issue. Do the candidates adopt the dangerous language of righteous empire in the war on terrorism and confuse the roles of God, church, and nation? Do the candidates see evil only in our enemies but never in our own policies? (Matthew 6:33, Proverbs 8:12-13 )

We believe that a consistent ethic of human life is a religious issue. Do the candidates' positions on abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, weapons of mass destruction, HIV/AIDS-and other pandemics-and genocide around the world obey the biblical injunction to choose life? (Deuteronomy 30:19)...

Monday, December 27, 2004

Conservatives vs. Wingnuts
...A month before the election, the invariably well-informed Bob Novak forecast that Bush would withdraw from Iraq and "end the neoconservative dream of building democracy in the Arab world." Pat Buchanan in these pages claimed that the Iraq mess had tempered any Bush lust for further imperial adventures. George Will, probably the most influential conservative columnist of all, began advertising his own disenchantment with neoconservative foreign policy in every other column, mocking the idea that Iraq would be democratic anytime soon ("Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.") and skewering the notion that democracy could be imposed by force from without. The neoconservative democracy crusaders, Will observed dryly, ought to remember an elemental principle of moral reasoning: "there can be no duty to do what cannot be done."

That apparent right-around-the-corner return to realism heralded the restoration of a natural order. Around the country are thousands with lifetime Republican attachments who supported or even served in the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and George Bush I for whom the neoconservative ascendancy was almost too bizarre to be believed. They thought that eventually reality would reassert itself. George W. Bush would talk to his father and mother or to Laura, and they would warn him that American foreign policy was running off the rails. Dick Cheney would understand. Donald Rumsfeld, who had begun to question whether we had a "metric" to know whether we were actually winning the War on Terror, would finally see the light. Yes, the United States went through a trauma on 9/11, and yes, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and David Wurmser happened to be right there to dust off and present a Mideast attack plan from a Benjamin Netanyahu/Project For the New American Century coven from the mid-1990s. While Washington was off guard, they saw their opportunity and took it. But Iraq had proved such a mess that the ship of state would right itself. Had to.

This was less wishful thinking than the natural human tendency to believe that the social patterns one has lived with for one's entire adult life--those that one's parents had lived with--would inevitably reassert themselves. It was a belief perhaps akin to the German Jewish bourgeoisie's as they watched the rise of Hitler: No, things couldn't get really bad, not in our Germany. In America, the phase is "it can't happen here."

One must be clear what "it" is. The Patriot Act is not a giant step towards domestic fascism, and we are not halfway to martial law. George W. Bush bears no hatred towards any minority group or even any domestic constituency.

For contemporary America, the "it" is the setting in full motion of an aggressive, reckless, militarized foreign policy, viewed as lawless by much of the world--one whose almost inevitable outcome is nuclear war. While Pinochet and Franco and for most of his reign Stalin kept within their own borders, Bush has ambitions of global scope. Of course they are idealistic ambitions, beautiful ambitions. The spread of democracy--especially if it springs up from a country's indigenous institutions and populace--is a very good thing. But the Bushites now see democracy's spread as necessary for America's own survival. The world, particularly the Muslim world, must become democratic now, or we will perish. The neoconservatives in the administration believe that democracy will spread only if the president commits more and more troops to Iraq and topples the regimes in Tehran and Damascus. As alarming as the neoconservatism of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Danielle Pletka, and John Bolton is, more alarming is the spirit that has spread in its wake--a kind of neoconservativism without a graduate degree.

You see it on certain blogs and hear it in the rants of some of the most widely listened to right-wing talk-radio hosts. If the Arabs don't want to be democratic, we should nuke them. We have no choice but to nuke them for our own safety. It's a vulgarized neoconservatism --no one from the American Enterprise Institute speaks like this (in public). But this talk is around in the heartland and growing, and it is wind in the sails of the new administration.

At this writing, the staffing of a new foreign-policy apparatus is not complete. But the broad strokes are plain. At CIA, there is a new emphasis on loyalty to the president over readiness to provide objective analysis; Porter Goss will ensure that the agency provides information that the White House wants to hear. At the cabinet level, the direction is clear. Colin Powell is leaving, exhausted by his losing tussles with the Pentagon, semi-humiliated by the president. His crime was that he was right about war in Iraq, right that we needed allies and more forces for the invasion, right that postwar Iraq would be chaos and quagmire. His caution about the use of force --the Pottery Barn rule--must have irked the president every time he saw him, so better to banish him. Promoted instead are those who were consistently wrong. Rumsfeld remains, though his neocon aides "stovepiped" phony intelligence about Iraq's WMD capacity, he botched the post invasion, and was responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture. Stephen Hadley, who "forgot" to remove the false claims about Iraq's yellowcake purchases from the president's 2003 State of the Union speech, is the new National Security Adviser. Condi Rice, whose TV musings about "mushroom clouds" helped frighten a nation into an unnecessary war, becomes the nation's top diplomat [...]

How has the country changed? Two years ago, when National Review editor Rich Lowry said that an appropriate response to a WMD attack on the United States might be to nuke Mecca, there was a fair amount of outrage. But Lowry, recall, was imagining how the United States might respond to a massive terrorist attack. Now the American airwaves and blogosphere are rife calls to nuke those whom military invasion couldn't turn into democrats. "Could it happen here?" the old question goes. In one sense it already has. ...

Sunday, December 26, 2004

I want my faith back
Getting personal about the political hijacking of religion.

There’s only one thing on my Christmas list this year:

I want my faith back.

I didn’t come by it easily. I’m a card-carrying liberal, skeptical by nature, with an almost knee-jerk eye-roll reaction to anyone who’s completely comfortable discussing their religious convictions in mixed company. I spent pretty much the entire decade of my 20s in an uncomfortable agnosticism because I just couldn’t make up my damn mind.

So now that I have — now that words like “sinful” spring to mind when I hear about the $40 million budget for George W. Bush’s inaugural soirees, instead of just “disgusting” — I’m starting to take the right wing’s
hijacking of my religion very, very personally.

“These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrine rules made by men.”
— Matthew 15:8-9

Shortly before the election an acquaintance who, like me, is a liberal Christian and a Methodist (a denomination we share, at least officially, with President Bush), sent me an op-ed piece written by a retired Methodist bishop. It critiqued Bush’s record in light of the United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline, the denomination’s central collection of beliefs and rules. Not surprisingly, the bishop found him lacking.

I forwarded the piece to a relative in another state who’s a part-time Methodist pastor, thinking he’d at least find it interesting. His response? Harsher than anything I’d expected. He defended Bush as the “man of faith” in the election. Kerry — a lifelong practicing Catholic — apparently didn’t fit the bill, although my relative didn’t give details to support that view. Furthermore, if Kerry were elected, he would “undermine the role of religion in public life” and appoint Supreme Court justices who eventually would restrict religious expression to the point that my relative wouldn’t be able to publicly denounce homosexuality as a sin. ...

Saturday, December 25, 2004

Fear Dims Christmas Eve in Baghdad
Many Iraqi Christians Avoid Mass as Guards, Barricades Protect Churches

BAGHDAD, Dec. 24 -- It was the night before Christmas, and at the Virgin Mary Church of Palestine Street in the Iraqi capital, parishioners were making last-minute preparations for the holiday.

Steel barricades were erected in front of the main gate to keep potential car bombers from getting too close to the church, and several young men rehearsed how they would search strangers for hidden explosives.

A few parishioners attended Mass on Christmas Eve at St. Joseph Chaldean Church in Baghdad. Security concerns forced the cancellation of many evening services in Iraq's capital; others were held in the morning. (Samir Mizban -- AP)

The security director -- the church hired one of its parishioners for the job a few months ago -- said softly that he placed his hand over his heart every morning as he walked to work.

"We are frightened," he said, his blue eyes looking down at a desk covered with passages from the Bible and images of Mary, the mother of Jesus. "People are frightened to come to church."

For the first time in as long as even the old women could remember, Iraqi Christians prepared for the Christmas holiday with heart-thumping sadness and dread. This was the year to scan the sanctuary for the safest place to sit in case a bomb exploded. Or not to go at all. ...

GOP Corporate Donors Cash In on Smut
...There was never any doubt how the good people of Utah County, Utah, would vote on Nov. 2. It has long prided itself as a bastion of conservatism and family values. And so when voters were given the opportunity to choose between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry, 86 percent of them went for Bush, making Utah County the second most Republican county in the most Republican state in the country. Utah County has a population of roughly 370,000. Its largest employer is the Mormon-run Brigham Young University.

But Utah County is also the home of a mid-1990s court case that demonstrated some of the ambiguity about "values," even in the reddest of the red states. Randy Spencer was the attorney that the court appointed to defend a the Movie Buff video store in American Fork from local prosecutors who had charged the store's owner with 15 counts of pornography for renting tapes such as "Jugsy," "Young Buns II" and "Sex Secrets of High-Priced Call Girls." The prosecutors claimed the store was violating the community standards of suburban Provo.

Spencer, who describes himself as a devout Mormon, challenged the prosecution's definition of the community's values by subpoenaing records that showed Utah County tolerated the consumption of porn in several outlets: Utah County cable subscribers had ordered at least 20,000 explicit movies in the past two years; the Sun Coast Video store in the town of Orem was deriving 20 percent of its rental sales from adult movies, even though adult movies only made up 2 percent of the store's inventory; Dirty Jo Punsters in nearby Spanish Fork was racking up on average $111,000 dollars per year selling sex toys, blow up dolls and other adult fare; the Provo Marriott across the street from the courthouse sold 3,448 adult pay-per-view movie rentals in 1998 alone.

"I was assigned to the case, and it was a real evolution for me," said Spencer in an interview last week. "The same religious values that I have are protected by the same Constitution that protects my neighbor's rights to do some things that I might not necessarily do."

About a year after the Utah case, a similar scenario played out in Hamilton County, Ohio, a conservative Cincinnati suburb. In 2001, under pressure from an influential local antiporn group, Citizens for Community Values, prosecutors filed obscenity charges against two local video stores for selling adult videos. The Cincinnati Enquirer launched an investigation of community standards and found that:

"Last year, more than 21,000 Hamilton County residents purchased 26,000 explicit videos from one of the nation's largest mail-order companies. A company spokeswoman described those sales as typical for a community of this size. . . . In January of this year, 182,000 Greater Cincinnati residents -- an estimated 70,000 from Hamilton County -- visited an adult Web site at least once. Nielsen - NetRatings found that 21.8 percent of all residents here who went online visited an adult site. The national average for January was 21.4 percent. In recent months, Hamilton County residents bought adult movies on pay-per-view TV at about the same rate as viewers did in other mid-sized TV markets. The numbers suggest county residents are quiet contributors to the adult industry's rapid growth. And with every purchase, they change Hamilton County's long-held notion of a community standard."

Again, the community standard in Hamilton County -- which favored Bush over Kerry 53-47 percent -- was pretty much what it was everywhere else. In this particular case, one of the video storeowners pleaded guilty and paid a small fine. The other decided to fight and was acquitted in a jury trial. ...

...Desperate Housewives, the hottest new show on television, features plotlines such as one in which a married woman is having an affair with her 17-year-old gardener and another in which a man murders his neighbor. Turns out, the show performed better in the November sweeps month in the red state markets of Dallas-Fort Worth (first), Atlanta (first) and Kansas City (second) than it did in the Blue state markets of New York (fourth), Chicago (fourth) and Boston (third), according to Nielson Media Research. The show did quite well in red state markets Salt Lake City (fourth) and Birmingham (sixth) as well....

...Spencer, the Mormon defense attorney in Utah County, said he couldn't help but be struck by a larger point: Big corporate America -- a staunch GOP ally -- was lining its pockets selling raunch to the masses, including the red state nation.

"A lot of it's coming from Republicans," Spencer said, referring to the corporate culprits who profit from smut. Spencer said he considers himself a Republican.

It's almost impossible to get a handle on how much money corporate America is reaping by peddling smut. General Motors Corp. is not eager to brag about how many dirty movies it sold last year through a subsidiary.

In the Utah County trial, Spencer asked the jury why a lone, small business vendor like Peterman should be held to a higher standard than the likes of W. Mitt Romney. At the time Romney was on the board of Marriott International, which was making huge margins on piping porn into hotel rooms. Currently, Romney is the Republican governor of Massachusetts and his travels around the country have helped fuel speculation that he might run for president in 2008.

Perhaps the most extensive mainstream media treatment on this subject ran four years ago in The New York Times. In a 4,000-word investigative opus, writer Timothy Egan connected the dots between porn and big corporate profits:

"The General Motors Corporation, the world's largest company, now sells more graphic sex films every year than does Larry Flynt, owner of the Hustler empire. The 8.7 million Americans who subscribe to DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary, buy nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films from satellite, according to estimates provided by distributors of the films, estimates the company did not dispute.

"EchoStar Communications Corporation, the No. 2 satellite provider, whose chief financial backers include Mr. Murdoch, makes more money selling graphic adult films through its satellite subsidiary than Playboy, the oldest and best-known company in the sex business, does with its magazine, cable and Internet businesses combined, according to public and private revenue accounts by the companies. ...

... For instance, Ruport Murdoch, the controlling owner of News Corp. -- which owns both the conservative Fox News and the popular and frequently salacious Fox TV -- continues to cash in. On one hand, Fox News employs commentators who promote the connection between Republicans and family values while other divisions of the company profit from sexually explicit content.

In fact, Murdoch's Fox TV network is fighting a record-setting FCC indecency fine for an episode of the now-canceled "Married by America" (which featured whipped-cream-covered strippers at a bachelor party and digitally obscured nudity) by arguing that the government should not even be in the business of regulating decency on the public airwaves. ...

Groups on Right Say Christmas Is Under Attack
..."This is the winter equivalent of those summer stories about shark attacks being on the increase," says Barry Lynn, who heads the liberal group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. The conservative groups, he said, "think they can make Christians feel like a besieged majority. It creates a Christian solidarity against all those who would oppress them: secularists in this season, gay and lesbians next month, abortion the next month."...

... In the case of secularizing Christmas, it is more difficult to demonstrate a widespread threat. "It's very convenient for Christians to say the culture has changed and they've lost power, but Christians have never been stronger politically," said Marci A. Hamilton, who teaches at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and has written a book, "God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law."

She said the threat to Christmas "is not secularization, it's pluralization. The law doesn't say Christian symbols have to be taken out of schools, only that it can't only be Christian, it has to be pluralistic."

ACLU President Nadine Strossen, similarly, said the conservative complaints are "like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling." She adds that while there are "occasional violations in either direction" on church-state separation, "if anything, since 1985, the Supreme Court has become more supportive of government-sponsored religious exercises."

The conservative groups agree there have been no recent legal cases limiting religious expression....

The True Spirit of Xmas
How 4/5 of the country became an oppressed minority

It's a Christmas tradition as venerable as mistletoe and caroling: As the days grow shorter, conservative activists claiming to speak for American Christendom raise their voices, not for a rousing round of "Good King Wenceslaus," but to complain that the roughly 75 to 80 percent of Americans who profess allegiance to some denomination or another of Christianity constitute a cruelly oppressed minority. ...

... While unusually visible this year, the panic over a War on Christmas is part of a more general persecution complex shared by some conservative Christians, which seems at least as strange as the minority-party style rage evidenced at this summer's Republican National Convention by people who now control every branch of government. While Catholic League honcho William Donohue targeted an old favorite when he complained on MSNBC that "Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," the favored villain these days appears to be secularism itself—particularly odd in the context of the Christmas issue, since most of those other "happy holidays" are also religious....

...In order to pull off the sort of grab at victim status conservatives used to deride as a tactic of the left, self-appointed defenders of the faith draw from a cornucopia of bogus anecdotes about oppression. A conservative cause celebre was born when Reuters ran a story under the headline "Declaration of Independence Banned at Calif School" about a teacher forbidden to use that document in classes on the grounds that it mentioned God. It sounds outrageous...and would be, if it were remotely true. It is, of course, not true: The Declaration appears in the school's standard textbooks and hangs on classroom walls. The school's principal, rather, insisted on pre-approving the handouts of a single teacher who had long generated complaints from parents because he was using his American History lessons as a pretext from indoctrination—a teacher who, as one student put it, "talks about Jesus 100 times a day." Judging by this Easter assignment and various other handouts, including fabricated quotations from Founding Fathers on the topic of religion, the concern was well motivated. ...

...Sometimes, of course, there's a straightforward and cynical explanation of persecution mania. During initial coverage of the murder of Matthew Shepard, widely regarded as an anti-gay hate crime, Today anchor Katie Couric asked a guest to comment on the hypothesis, advanced by some gay activists, that the anti-gay rhetoric of groups like Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition may have helped to create an atmosphere in which such attacks were more likely. In the wake of recent reporting questioning whether homophobia was the real motive for the murder, Focus on the Family president Don Hodel demanded an apology, seeing Couric's question as evidence of her "anti-Christian agenda." The point of this rhetorical sleight-of-hand is transparent enough: Complaining that your group and your actions have been attacked wins less sympathy and fewer allies than declaring that our shared identity is under assault....

... So are we really seeing an unprecedented wave of hostility toward either Christmas or Christianity? Or is it, rather, that the waning of the cultural hegemony to which some Christians have come to feel entitled is perceived as an attack? Many of the most loudly trumpeted complaints in this vein are, after all, complaints about the absence of special treatment: no special spot for the Ten Commandments in the courthouse rotunda; no pride of place for Christmas among those happy winter holidays; no exceptions for the Christian charity.

Since "special rights" has been a term of aspersion among conservatives for decades, would-be theocrats have at least the decency to be too ashamed to demand them explicitly. Instead, they've learned the power of the victim narrative, of framing the debate to cast themselves as underdogs. Rather than attempting to entrench their values, demagogues purport to be playing defense against a plot to "purge religion from the public square," trading on the same ambiguity in the word "public" that has eased the acceptance of ever more regulation of privately owned establishments that are open to the public, and allowed for the metastasis of the term "public health," which now apparently covers not just infectious disease control or mosquito abatement, but smoking and obesity. Since the battle is a reactive one against the undifferentiated forces of anti-Christian bigotry, such nice distinctions as that between a business that fails to cater to its customers and an arm of the state adhering to strict neutrality can be dispensed with. More importantly, moderate Christians with no desire to impose their faith on others might be convinced to support a re-Christianization of public life on the premise that they'd only be defending themselves against marauding secularists.

The stratagem is so perverse as to be almost admirable: Take a holiday associated with sentiments like peace and goodwill, mix in some well-intentioned attempts to acknowledge it in an inclusive way suited to a pluralistic society, and then use the combination to generate fear, divisiveness, and high ratings. But whether we're impressed or appalled by that cynical ploy, whether we're gearing up for Christmas dinner or just a post-Ramadan pig-out, we can all breathe a little easier knowing that the anti-Christmas "jihad" is no more real (sorry kids) than Santa Claus. Happy holidays.

Christmas Under Seige
Bill O'Reilly has joined the chorus of FOX commentators who bemoan the fact that poor old Christmas is under attack. The following words, I believe, sum up his position pretty well, even though they are not his:

And it has become pretty general. Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth. Easter they will have the same difficulty in finding Easter cards that contain any suggestion that Easter commemorates a certain event. There will be rabbits and eggs and spring flowers, but a hint of the Resurrection will be hard to find. Now, all this begins with the designers of the cards.

To whom do these words belong?

Sean Hannity? John Gibson? Jerry Falwell? Pat Robertson? Ann Coulter? Michelle Malkin? Newt Gingrich? Brent Bozell? Mark Hyman? Rush Limbaugh? Davis Asman? John Kasich?

None of the above.

They were penned by Henry Ford in 1921 in his tract "The International Jew," a vile piece of anti-semitic garbage written by someone who blamed the International Jew Conspiracy for every ill that has ever befallen mankind. Henry Ford's type of thinking spawned the whole line of fearful, angry little men and women who daily spew their hatred on FOX News, vomiting up daily discourses that advance their own petty little prejudices and pander to the lowest common denominator among their viewership.

It seems to me that we have entered into a new phase wherein self-proclaimed representatives of the Christian majority - frightened by events beyond their control, who see Osama bin Laden under their beds and terrorists in the hedgerow - are yet again scapegoating another "minority" - only this time no one actually says the word "Jew" or "Jewish."...

See also.

No peace on Earth during unjust war
BY ANDREW GREELEY

One reads in the papers that the Pentagon expects the war in Iraq to continue till 2010. Donald Rumsfeld will not guarantee that it will be over by 2009. How many dead and maimed Americans by then? How many sad obituaries? How many full pages in the papers with pictures of all the casualties?

Why?

The reasons change: weapons of mass destruction, war on terror, freedom and democracy for the people of Iraq, American credibility. All are deceptions. This cockamamie and criminally immoral war was planned before the Sept. 11 attack in which Iraq was not involved. It has nothing to do with the war on terror. American-style freedom and democracy in Arab countries are hallucinations by men and women like Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice whose contribution to the war is writing long memos -- Republican intellectuals with pointy heads.

One must support the troops, I am told. I certainly support the troops the best way possible: Bring them home, get them out of a war for which the planning was inadequate, the training nonexistent, the goal obscure, and the equipment and especially the armor for their vehicles inferior. They are brave men and women who believe they are fighting to defend their country and have become sitting ducks for fanatics. Those who die are the victims of the big lie. They believe that they are fighting to prevent another terror attack on the United States. They are not the war criminals. The ''Vulcans,'' as the Bush foreign policy team calls itself, are the criminals, and they ought to face indictment as war criminals....

...One of the criteria for a just war is that there be a reasonable chance of victory. Where is that reasonable chance? Each extra day of the war makes it more unjust, more criminal. The guilty people are not only the Vulcans but those Americans who in the November election endorsed the war.

They are also responsible for the Iraqi deaths, especially the men who join the police or the army because they need the money to support their families -- their jobs eaten up in the maw of the American ''liberation.'' Iraqi deaths don't trouble many Americans. Their attitude is not unlike the e-mail writer who said he rejoices every time a Muslim kills another Muslim. ''Let Allah sort them out.''

This time of the year we celebrate ''peace on Earth to men of good will.'' Americans must face the fact that they can no longer claim to be men and women of good will, not as long as they support an unnecessary, foolish, ill-conceived, badly executed and, finally, unwinnable war. If most people in other countries blame the war on Americans, we earned that blame in the November election...

Labels: evilvangelicals, war

It's Christmas, and the Echo Chamber Is in Full Chorus
Stories about banned Christmas carols and employers forbidding the use of "Merry Christmas" in favor of "Happy Holidays" seem to pop up each December. Over the past few days, however, the issue has been moved front and center by a hungry press, with stories popping up in the national media almost daily, and conservative television host Bill O'Reilly running a daily segment titled "Christmas Under Siege."

But wade through the wall-to-wall coverage of the story, and it becomes apparent that there are only a handful of examples -- three, to be exact -- being recycled in article after article. Many of these pieces use the same incidents in almost the same way. Some even hit for the cycle, as USA Today did today, referencing all three stories in one shot....

Friday, December 24, 2004

Paul—Christianity's Unlikely Champion
John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed Examine One of Christianity's Enigmatic Founders.

Mention the term “Son of God” and most people today think immediately of Jesus. But if it had been uttered anywhere in the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus, hardly a soul would have thought of anyone but Augustus Caesar—divi filius, divine son of the deified Julius Caesar. Augustus had conquered the world and established peace on Earth, the Pax Romana that would last some 200 years. Augustus was revered as Lord, Redeemer and Savior of the World.

Now imagine the apostle Paul crossing the Mediterranean to proclaim that Jesus, a man he’d never met and who’d been executed by Rome as a criminal years earlier, was actually the Son of God, our Lord. Paul was usurping titles reserved for Caesar and applying them to Jesus—a calculated act of treason. ...

...Paul has been criticized in recent years for advocating the submissiveness of women. Crossan and Reed try to set the record straight, distinguishing between New Testament letters written by Paul and other letters that, in a tradition common then, were attributed to him. The authentic Pauline letters (e.g., Romans, Galatians) speak of a radical equality in Christ in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. Later non-Pauline writings, such as 1 Timothy, which says that women should stay home, get pregnant, and keep silent, attempted to change Paul’s image to suit the later needs of the church—to “sanitize a social subversive, to domesticate a dissident apostle, and to make Christianity and Rome safe for one another.”...

...The questions at the heart of this book are: What was the purpose of Paul’s mission and what was his message? Paul directly opposed Roman imperial theology, which in its claims for the emperor’s divinity went beyond rhetoric or Caesarean swagger to form “the ideological core of Roman imperial power, the theological heart of Roman global rule,” Crossan and Reed write. Caesar ruled by a mandate from heaven to secure peace through victory. This divine directive involved a sequence of actions visually depicted by the ancient Roman sculptured altar Ara Pacis Augustae: piety, war, victory and peace.

Paul’s alternative, based on the teachings of Jesus, called for peace through justice. Like Jesus, Paul was a Jewish visionary in the tradition of Old Testament prophets who claimed that if justice is established, peace will follow. He opposed the Roman empire ideal of achieving social order through power, possession and hierarchy. Paul offered Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God, which promises equality and peace to all, here and now, as a free gift of God. ...

Presbyterians Criticize 'Left Behind' Theology
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (RNS) -- Presbyterians went on record last week (June 14) as opposing the end-times theology in the wildly popular "Left Behind" book series, objecting to the idea that God would allow any of his followers to suffer.

Delegates to the church's annual General Assembly meeting overwhelmingly approved a resolution saying the books' theology "is not in accord with our Reformed understanding" of the New Testament book of Revelation.

The "Left Behind" series, co-authored by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, uses an end-times theology in which millions of Christians are taken to heaven in an instant rapture and nonbelievers are given a second chance at salvation during seven years of tribulation.

Many Reformed churches, including the Presbyterian Church (USA) meeting here this week, reject such a literal view, arguing that the end of the world will be marked by a return of Jesus, judgment for all mankind and an eternal reign.

The Rev. Lewis Wilkins, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lovington, N.M., argued for the resolution, saying some Presbyterians in his state -- especially children -- have been bullied by "Left Behind" fans. Wilkins said "Left Behind" is a misreading of the Book of Revelation. ...

Restoring Christmas
...I don’t know if that brings me logically to the question of whether somebody initially hailed by those who accepted his message as the Prince of Peace would be pleased that so many of his titular followers enthusiastically embrace an aggressive war or not, but that’s where I’m going. In this season that celebrates his birth – whether seasonally accurate or not; many scholars think it more likely he was born in August – I would like to offer a plea not to judge Jesus by some of his would-be disciples.

Almost everything about Jesus’ life – a life certain evangelicals actually downplay in favor of certain other parts of the Bible – suggests dismay not only at the power structures human beings erect to lord it over one another, but at religious manifestations that allow believers to feel superior and privileged as compared to other mere mortals.

It starts with his birth, which some of us will celebrate tomorrow. The story is so familiar that it is easy to forget how odd it is in terms of the values of this world. Wouldn’t you expect somebody touted as the savior of humankind to be born in a palace – or at least someplace comfortable? Instead, the story – which may be a legend but it is significant that this is the legend the early church chose to perpetuate – is that he was born in a smelly manger, among cattle and chickens, after his parents were turned away from every inn. All this happened because a distant ruler forced people to move around for the convenience of the authorities.

DISDAIN FOR AUTHORITY

Is this implied disdain for the authorities of the world simply a coincidence? In 1987, theologian Vernard Eller of LaVerne University wrote a fascinating book titled Christian Anarchy. He didn’t use the term in the conventional political sense, but harked back to its Greek roots. An "archy" or "arky" is a human power or authority structure. The kind of anarchist Eller believed Jesus was (along with Paul!) was not a political revolutionary who wanted to overthrow all governments; indeed, the Gospels tell us that Jesus strongly resisted a rather persistent desire on the part of some of his followers to become a mere political leader. Instead, his kind of anarchist was indifferent to human archies – as somebody who is amoral is not necessarily immoral or hostile to morality but simply indifferent to it – because he had such great respect for the ultimate archy of God, which was based on love and benevolence rather than power and the use of force.

This doesn’t mean being indifferent to injustice or oppression, simply understanding that you can’t fight injustice with the tools at which oppression excels: force, coercion, power and strength of arms.

This doesn’t necessarily imply wimpy acquiescence in injustice. Here’s an example from Walter Wink’s recent book, The Impossible Will Take a Little While. You remember the admonition to turn the other cheek? It wasn’t as passive as it sounds. Wink notes that Jesus actually said, if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also:

"Why the right cheek? How does one strike another on the right cheek anyway? Try it. A blow by the right fist in that right-handed world would land on the left cheek of the opponent. To strike the right cheek with the fist would require using the left hand, but in that society the left hand was used only for unclean tasks ... The only way one could strike the right cheek with the right hand would be with the back of the hand.

"What we are dealing with here is unmistakably an insult, not a fistfight. The intention is not to injure but to humiliate, to put someone in his or her place. One normally did not strike a peer this way, and if one did the fine was exorbitant. A backhand slap was a normal way of admonishing inferiors. Masters backhanded slaves; husbands, wives; parents, children; men, women; Romans, Jews. ....

"Why then does Jesus counsel these humiliated people to turn to other cheek? Because this action robs the oppressor of power to humiliate them. The person who turns the other cheek is saying, in effect, ‘Try again. Your first blow failed to achieve its intended effect. I deny you the power to humiliate me. I am a human being, just like you. Your status (gender, race, age, wealth) does not alter that. You cannot demean me.’ Such a response would create enormous difficulties for the striker. Purely logistically, how can he now hit the other cheek? He cannot backhand it with his right hand. If he hits it with a fist, he makes himself an equal, acknowledging the other as a peer. But the whole point of the back of the hand is to reinforce the caste system and its institutionalized inequality."

Jesus was actually suggesting social and intellectual jujitsu against illegitimate authority – with the clear implication that any form of merely human authority is illegitimate since all are equal in the eyes of God. Considering by how long Christianity – albeit perhaps more often than not in a twisted form, much more enamored of human authority and the things of this world than would please Jesus, but with the power of the Gospel still able to bring believers back to the simpler, more direct, more humane message of Jesus – has outlasted the Roman Empire, perhaps he had something....

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Christmas Story Offers Civic Lesson
...What is missed is a side of the story that doesn’t serve well with easy conversation over eggnog. It’s about political power and civic dissent.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the Christmas story records a journey from the East--most likely Persia--to Jerusalem by wise men, alternatively called kings or magi. They were really astrologers: the inquisitive, the intellectuals, the scientists of their day...

...While the broad strokes of this story may be recalled, it is the wise men’s civic engagement that deserves recovery, for they offer us a much-needed model.

The wise men refused the seduction of political power. They listened respectfully to Herod but kept their objectivity. They discerned the signs of the times and practiced daring dissent in the face of distortive power. They remained faithful to their religious mission.

Today we also need discerning people of faith, who engage but keep their distance from political power, deflecting its inherent manipulation and dissenting from its use of religion for the exercise of malignant power.

Those who bore gifts for the messiah also bear a gift for our society—the need for discernment and dissent.

The politics of the Christmas story
THE SINGLE most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome's day is over.

The Gospel of Matthew builds its nativity narrative around Herod's determination to kill the baby, whom he recognizes as a threat to his own political sway. The Romans were an occupation force in Palestine, and Herod was their puppet-king. To the people of Israel, the Roman occupation, which preceded the birth of Jesus by at least 50 years, was a defilement, and Jewish resistance was steady. (The historian Josephus says that after an uprising in Jerusalem around the time of the birth of Jesus, the Romans crucified 2,000 Jewish rebels.)

Herod was right to feel insecure on his throne. In order to preempt any challenge from the rumored newborn "king of the Jews," Herod murdered "all the male children who were 2 years old or younger." Joseph, warned in a dream, slipped out of Herod's reach with Mary and Jesus. Thus, right from his birth, the child was marked as a political fugitive.

The Gospel of Luke puts an even more political cast on the story. The narrative begins with the decree of Caesar Augustus calling for a world census -- a creation of tax rolls that will tighten the empire's grip on its subject peoples. It was Caesar Augustus who turned the Roman republic into a dictatorship, a power-grab he reinforced by proclaiming himself divine.

His census decree is what requires the journey of Joseph and the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem, but it also defines the context of their child's nativity as one of political resistance. When the angel announces to shepherds that a "savior has been born," as scholars like Richard Horsley point out, those hearing the story would immediately understand that the blasphemous claim by Caesar Augustus to be "savior of the world" was being repudiated.

When Jesus was murdered by Rome as a political criminal -- crucifixion was the way such rebels were executed -- the story's beginning was fulfilled in its end....

...This is how it came to be that Christmas in America has turned the nativity of Jesus on its head. No surprise there, for if the story were told today with Roman imperialism at its center, questions might arise about America's new self-understanding as an imperial power. A story of Jesus born into a land oppressed by a hated military occupation might prompt an examination of the American occupation of Iraq. A story of Jesus come decidedly to the poor might cast a pall over the festival of consumption. A story of the Jewishness of Jesus might undercut the Christian theology of replacement....

Good News for Saddam Hussein
The neo-cons who propagated the story that Saddam "gassed his own people," i.e., the Iraqi Kurds, will still insist he did gas the Kurds, back in 1988 when he gave the order to Chemical Ali, who told the Iraqi army to commit genocide at the town of Halabja. But the news from Mohammed al-Obaidi is that the team prosecuting Saddam for crimes against humanity has dropped the genocide charge “due to insufficient evidence.”

Al-Obaidi assures me the news is true, and if it is, we should be learning about it sooner or later from our news media. It will further complicate the Bush administration’s problems in Iraq, as it had been relying on the genocide charge to justify “regime change” in Baghdad when the other rationales – WMD and Al Qaida connections – failed. I may be wrong, but if this turns out to be true, it would be a positive development in resolving the conflict in Iraq sooner, rather than later. Once the U.S. press corps focuses on the issue, it would force President Bush to re-examine his own assumptions about the rationale for unilateral action and make it easier for him to shift gears toward greater international involvement in resolving the several conflated issues in the Middle East.

As most of you know, I have for the last two years argued that whatever else Saddam Hussein did for good or ill as Iraq’s president since 1978, there is no evidence that he committed genocide. That he gassed the Iraqi Kurds has been an assertion that has been repeated so often by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the American press that I’m sure 99.9% of the people believe it is gospel. I sent the "news" to several editors and a great many political reporters yesterday when I learned of it, but nothing yet has surfaced. Al-Obaidi tells me the news has appeared in the Arabic press. ...

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Bush's War
So, who is to blame for all the deaths in Iraq? Let's mull this one over a bit, shall we?...

New Papers Suggest Detainee Abuse Was Widespread
The Bush administration is facing a wave of new allegations that the abuse of foreign detainees in U.S. military custody was more widespread, varied and grave in the past three years than the Defense Department has long maintained.

New documents released yesterday detail a series of probes by Army criminal investigators into multiple cases of threatened executions of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers, as well as of thefts of currency and other private property, physical assaults, and deadly shootings of detainees at detention camps in Iraq.

In many of the newly disclosed cases, Army commanders chose noncriminal punishments for those involved in the abuse, or the investigations were so flawed that prosecutions could not go forward, the documents show. Human rights groups said yesterday that, as a result, the penalties imposed were too light to suit the offenses.

The complaints arose from several thousand new pages of internal reports, investigations and e-mails from different agencies, which, with other documents released in the past two weeks, paint a finer-grained picture of military abuse and criminal behavior at prisons in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan than previously available....

Torture reconsidered: Shock, awe and the human body
PARIS A historian in the future, or a moralist, is likely to deem the Bush administration's enthusiasm for torture the most striking aspect of its war against terrorism.

This started early. Proposals to authorize torture were circulating even before there was anyone to torture. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration made it known that the United States was no longer bound by international treaties, or by American law and established U.S. military standards, concerning torture and the treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2001, the Justice Department had drafted memos on how to protect military and intelligence officers from eventual prosecution under existing U.S. law for their treatment of Afghan and other prisoners.

In January 2002, the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales (who is soon to become attorney general), advised George W. Bush that it could be done by fiat. If the president simply declared "detainees" in Afghanistan outside the protection of the Geneva conventions, the 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act - which carries a possible death penalty for Geneva violations - would not apply....

...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called "shock and awe." It was meant as intimidation. We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to world opinion. We will stop at nothing.

In that respect, it is like the attack on Falluja last month, which - destructive as it was - was fundamentally a symbolic operation. Any insurgent who wanted to escape could do so long before the much-advertised attack actually began. Its real purpose was exemplary destruction: to deliver a message to all of Iraq that this is what the United States can do to you if you continue the resistance. It was collective punishment of the city's occupants for having tolerated terrorist operations based there....

...Destroying cities and torturing prisoners are things you do when you are losing the real war, the war your enemies are fighting. They are signals of moral bankruptcy. They destroy the confidence and respect of your friends, and reinforce the credibility of the enemy.

An Interview with Jon Butler ... Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
Mr. Butler, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Yale University, is the author of Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People(Harvard University Press, 1990). This interview was conducted by HNN editor Rick Shenkman for The Learning Channel series, "Myth America," which aired several years ago.

You hear it all the time from the right wing. The United States was founded as a Christian country. What do you make of that?

Well, first of all, it wasn't. The United States wasn't founded as a Christian country. Religion played very little role in the American Revolution and it played very little role in the making of the Constitution. That's largely because the Founding Fathers were on the whole deists who had a very abstract conception of God, whose view of God was not a God who acted in the world today and manipulated events in a way that actually changed the course of human history. Their view of religion was really a view that stressed ethics and morals rather than a direct divine intervention. ...

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Mithraism arose in the Mediterranean world at the same time as Christianity, either imported from Iran, as Franz Cumont believed, or as a new religion which borrowed the name Mithras from the Persians, as the Congress of Mithraic Studies suggested in 1971.

Mithraism radiated from India where there is evidence of its practice from 1400 B.C. Mitra was part of the Hindu pantheon and Mithra was a minor Zooroastrian deity, the god of the airy light between heaven and earth. He was also a military general in Chinese mythology .

The soldiers' god, even in Rome (although the faith was embraced by male emperors, farmers, bureaucrats, merchants, and slaves, as well as soldiers), demanded a high standard of behavior, “temperance, self-control, and compassion -- even in victory”. Thus, Tertullian chides his fellow Christians for unbecoming behavior: “Are you not ashamed, my fellow soldiers of Christ, that you will be condemned, not by Christ, but by some soldier of Mithras?”

The comparison of Mithraists and Christians is not coincidental. December 25 was Mithras' birthday before it was Jesus'....

...But the actual choice of December 25 for Christmas was made under the Emperor Aurelian because this was the date of the Winter Solstice and was the day devotees of Mithras celebrated the dies natalis solis invicti (birthday of the invincible sun).

Mithraism, like Christianity, offers salvation to its adherents. Mithras was born into the world to save humanity from evil. Both figures ascended in human form, Mithras to wield the sun chariot, Christ to Heaven. The following summarizes the aspects of Mithraism that are also found in Christianity.

“Mithras, the sun-god, was born of a virgin in a cave on December 25, and worshipped on Sunday, the day of the conquering sun. He was a savior-god who rivaled Jesus in popularity. He died and was resurrected in order to become a messenger god, an intermediary between man and the good god of light, and the leader of the forces of righteousness against the dark forces of the god evil.”
- Pagan Origins of Christmas

Cancer: (June 22—July 22)
Death by firing squad has a certain desolate nobility, but it'll be ruined when the inept, drunken Australians fail to hit you above your waist with the first nine volleys.

On Capitol Hill, a Thirst for That 'Heavenly Brew'
St. Mark's Has Its Own Beer, and Young Adults Beat a Path to Its Door

Since introducing its own brand of lager this fall, St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill has seen an influx of twenty- and thirty-somethings on Sunday mornings.

"I can't say it's a compelling reason," Rector Paul Abernathy said when asked whether the addition of Winged Lion Lager to Sunday's pub lunch menu had anything to do with the new faces at St. Mark's.

But he acknowledged the coincidence and said with a smile, "I'll find out."

Pub lunches are a long-standing tradition at the 135-year-old church, which has 700 members who pride themselves on their spirit of fellowship and conviviality, Abernathy said.

Sharing a brew in a family atmosphere is one way they take part. Every Sunday after the 11 o'clock service, more than 100 people gather in the parish hall for pub-style fare that includes soup, sandwiches, salad, bread, beer, soda and wine. ...

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”: Defending Liberal Protestantism in the 1920sThis morning we are to think of the fundamentalist controversy which threatens to divide the American churches as though already they were not sufficiently split and riven. A scene, suggestive for our thought, is depicted in the fifth chapter of the Book of the Acts, where the Jewish leaders hale before them Peter and other of the apostles because they had been preaching Jesus as the Messiah. Moreover, the Jewish leaders propose to slay them, when in opposition Gamaliel speaks “Refrain from these men, and let them alone; for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be overthrown; but if it is of God ye will not be able to overthrow them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God.” . . .

Already all of us must have heard about the people who call themselves the Fundamentalists. Their apparent intention is to drive out of the evangelical churches men and women of liberal opinions. I speak of them the more freely because there are no two denominations more affected by them than the Baptist and the Presbyterian. We should not identify the Fundamentalists with the conservatives. All Fundamentalists are conservatives, but not all conservatives are Fundamentalists. The best conservatives can often give lessons to the liberals in true liberality of spirit, but the Fundamentalist program is essentially illiberal and intolerant.

The Fundamentalists see, and they see truly, that in this last generation there have been strange new movements in Christian thought. A great mass of new knowledge has come into man’s possession—new knowledge about the physical universe, its origin, its forces, its laws; new knowledge about human history and in particular about the ways in which the ancient peoples used to think in matters of religion and the methods by which they phrased and explained their spiritual experiences; and new knowledge, also, about other religions and the strangely similar ways in which men’s faiths and religious practices have developed everywhere. . . .

Now, there are multitudes of reverent Christians who have been unable to keep this new knowledge in one compartment of their minds and the Christian faith in another. They have been sure that all truth comes from the one God and is His revelation. Not, therefore, from irreverence or caprice or destructive zeal but for the sake of intellectual and spiritual integrity, that they might really love the Lord their God, not only with all their heart and soul and strength but with all their mind, they have been trying to see this new knowledge in terms of the Christian faith and to see the Christian faith in terms of this new knowledge.

Doubtless they have made many mistakes. Doubtless there have been among them reckless radicals gifted with intellectual ingenuity but lacking spiritual depth. Yet the enterprise itself seems to them indispensable to the Christian Church. The new knowledge and the old faith cannot be left antagonistic or even disparate, as though a man on Saturday could use one set of regulative ideas for his life and on Sunday could change gear to another altogether. We must be able to think our modern life clear through in Christian terms, and to do that we also must be able to think our Christian faith clear through in modern terms.

There is nothing new about the situation. It has happened again and again in history, as, for example, when the stationary earth suddenly began to move and the universe that had been centered in this planet was centered in the sun around which the planets whirled. Whenever such a situation has arisen, there has been only one way out—the new knowledge and the old faith had to be blended in a new combination. Now, the people in this generation who are trying to do this are the liberals, and the Fundamentalists are out on a campaign to shut against them the doors of the Christian fellowship. Shall they be allowed to succeed?

It is interesting to note where the Fundamentalists are driving in their stakes to mark out the deadline of doctrine around the church, across which no one is to pass except on terms of agreement. They insist that we must all believe in the historicity of certain special miracles, preeminently the virgin birth of our Lord; that we must believe in a special theory of inspiration—that the original documents of the Scripture, which of course we no longer possess, were inerrantly dictated to men a good deal as a man might dictate to a stenographer; that we must believe in a special theory of the Atonement—that the blood of our Lord, shed in a substitutionary death, placates an alienated Deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner; and that we must believe in the second coming of our Lord upon the clouds of heaven to set up a millennium here, as the only way in which God can bring history to a worthy denouement. Such are some of the stakes which are being driven to mark a deadline of doctrine around the church....

...Here in the Christian Church today are these two groups, and the question which the Fundamentalists have raised is this—Shall one of them drive the other out? Do we think the cause of Jesus Christ will be furthered by that? If He should walk through the ranks of his congregation this morning, can we imagine Him claiming as His own those who hold one idea of inspiration and sending from Him into outer darkness those who hold another? You cannot fit the Lord Christ into that Fundamentalist mold. The church would better judge His judgment. For in the Middle West the Fundamentalists have had their way in some communities and a Christian minister tells us the consequences. He says that the educated people are looking for their religion outside the churches....

...These two groups exist in the Christian churches and the question raised by the Fundamentalists is—Shall one of them drive the other out? Will that get us anywhere? Multitudes of young men and women at this season of the year are graduating from our schools of learning, thousands of them Christians who may make us older ones ashamed by the sincerity of their devotion to God’s will on earth. They are not thinking in ancient terms that leave ideas of progress out. They cannot think in those terms. There could be no greater tragedy than that the Fundamentalists should shut the door of the Christian fellowship against such....

The Day the Enlightenment Went Out
This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).

The results bring to mind a visit the Dalai Lama made to Chicago not long ago. I was one of the people deputized to ask him questions on the stage at the Field Museum. He met with the interrogators beforehand and asked us to give him challenging questions, since he is too often greeted with deference or flattery.

The only one I could think of was: "If you could return to your country, what would you do to change it?" He said that he would disestablish his religion, since "America is the proper model." I later asked him if a pluralist society were possible without the Enlightenment. "Ah," he said. "That's the problem." He seemed to envy America its Enlightenment heritage.

Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed "a candid world," as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated....

A List of Screwy Christian Stuff
Seeking an authentic faith and a solid education, this writer enrolled at Oral Roberts University. Soon, he was questioning his choice of schools—and keeping a list....

...Near the top of the list of Screwy Stuff: Naming it and claiming it. Prayers that name what the pray-er wants, and claim what the pray-er wants. Name it and claim it, goes the imperative. If you name it and claim it, you will get it.

My mind is boggled by this formula for the first time at a dorm prayer meeting I attend. Not bothered, not bemused, but boggled, astonished into confusion. Tossed all around. It could have been, maybe should have been, a blip on the screen, a bump in the road I hop over and move on. But, no. It is a boggling.

At the beginning of the meeting someone stands up and asks for prayer requests. Hands pop up, are called upon. Requests are taken. A sister-in-law has been diagnosed with cancer. A father is falling away from the Lord. The MCAT is coming up. One person needs help paying for overdue medical bills, another for buying a new truck so he can get to work.

After the requests, people volunteer to pray for each one. The guy who needs the truck volunteers to pray for his own request, and when he does, he names it and claims it:

“Father, You know I need a new truck, so right now I just claim a Toyota 4x4, 3.4 liter, six-cylinder, extended cab . . . red with white trim. I need low payments and affordable insurance. I just claim these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

This being the first time I’ve heard anything like it, I look around and expect to see everyone smiling and nodding along with the joke. But all heads are bowed, all eyes closed. The prayers continue in all seriousness, from the Toyota to cancer.

I slide down into my seat, into my boggling. This, I will discover, is a strange breed of Pentecostalism, a teaching of personal empowerment that had a heyday but is in its dying gasps. But everyone seems on board with it in this moment, and that frightens me into wondering if I am supposed to be on board, too....

For the faithful, fighting back isn't an option
...Miller, 33, lives in Laurelhurst, worships at Imago Dei, and writes on faith with candor and passion reminiscent of Frederick Buechner and Anne Lamott. His latest book, "Searching for God Knows What," is fresh out. "Blue Like Jazz," Miller's previous effort, has sold 120,000 copies and kept him hopping on the college lecture circuit for most of the last four months, despite limited reviews.

Miller understands the critics' reticence: "I've yet to have anyone tell me what the book is about," he says. "It's essentially about me finding faith in Christ outside the church."

Why outside?

"Because the church has been hijacked by the issues of gay marriage and abortion, two ideas Christ never speaks of," Miller says. "This is what people embedded in the church don't understand. When you go out and ask someone what Christianity is about, they'll say it's about gay marriage and abortion. They don't know anything else.

And small wonder, Miller says: "No Christian organization is chaining itself to the church doors over the issue of divorce. No Christian group is lobbying President Bush to do something about the Sudan.

"The other myth the church buys into? The church believes Pharisees no longer exist. Jerry Falwell is a great example of that. He'll go on CNN and talk about morality, but he'll never share the Gospel. Why? Because Falwell thinks, 'Morality redeems me.' "

In "a huge slice" of the evangelical church, Miller says, Jesus "is a technicality. He's a poster boy for our Western political agenda; he's not the son of God." In Christ's absence, "squeaky wheels" like Falwell, Bob Jones III and James Dobson dispense with the fruits of the spirit to preach moral superiority and propagate the culture war.

"There's increasingly this feeling that if we are right spiritually and right morally, we can be mean people," Miller says. "Whatever happened to turn the other cheek? Love your enemies? Season your speech with grace? There's only war rhetoric. It's Gettysburg. 'Your children are going to turn gay unless you get your fists up.' I don't understand how Falwell can say God was judging America by bringing down the twin towers and survive in the evangelical community." ...

FBI Claims More Arab Prisoners Abused
... Many agents assigned to Iraq and Cuba reported witnessing incidents of abuse by military units or civilian contractors.

In a June "Urgent Report" to the FBI director from the Sacramento field office, for example, a supervising special agent described abuses such as "strangulation, beatings, placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings and unauthorized interrogations."

The supervisor added that some officials "were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses."

In other instances, a female prisoner "indicated she was hit with a stick," according to a memo from last May, and in July, Army criminal investigators were reviewing "the alleged rape of a juvenile male detainee at Abu Ghraib prison."

Still other agents gave more detailed accounts of abuse.

In June, for instance, an agent from the Washington field office reported that an Abu Ghraib detainee was "cuffed" and placed into a position the military called "The Scorpion" hold. Then, according to what the prisoner told the FBI, he was doused with cold water, dropped onto barbed wire, dragged by his feet and punched in the stomach.

In Cuba, a detainee in May, 2002, was reportedly spat upon and then beaten when he attempted to roll onto his stomach to protect himself. At one point, soldiers apparently were "beating him and grabbed his head and beat it into the cell floor," knocking him unconscious.

Another agent reported this past August that while in Cuba he often saw detainees chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor "with no chair, food or water."

"Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left for 18-24 hours or more," the agent wrote.

Sometimes, he reported, the room was chilled to where a "barefooted detainee was shaking with cold." Other times, the air-conditioning was turned off and the temperature in the unventilated room rose to well over 100 degrees.

"The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him," the agent reported. "He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

The FBI documents also included a report about a prisoner in Cuba whose legs were injured and who said he lied about being a terrorist for fear that otherwise the U.S. military would amputate him.

"He indicated he was injured severely and in a lot of pain," the FBI wrote. Yet the prisoner constantly was being asked whether he had attended a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.

The agent wrote that the prisoner "stated he wanted to receive decent medical treatment, and felt the only way to get it was to tell the Americans what they wanted to hear."

How Jesus Got Demoted by the Religious Right
Leaders of the decidedly nonconservative "conservative" right avoid focusing on what Jesus actually said; his teachings would prohibit their campaign to forcibly remake others – Christian and nonChristian alike – into their own image.

But they can't just come out and say "don't pay any attention to Jesus' teachings" because this would alarm the majority of Christians. So rightwing religious leaders are doing what tyrants aiming to divide and conquer Christians have always done:

(1) They distract us away from Jesus' teachings and commands by focusing exclusively on his birth, death, and ticket-to-salvation role,

(2) They claim to be biblical literalists, "Bible-believing Christians" to pre-empt criticism, yet blatantly pick and choose only those verses that serve their purposes, and

(3) They refer constantly to "God" rather than "Jesus," a potent subliminal strategy that convinces Christians to focus on a violent disciplinarian God rather than a gently shepherding Jesus. By instilling the terror of God's punishment instead of the love of Jesus' guidance, rightwing Christian leaders have convinced American Christians that the wrathful, violent God portrayed in pre-Christian times is the one they’d better obey, while they need only to believe in Jesus (easy), not obey him (difficult).

In these ways, Jesus has been demoted in the current strain of "conservative" Christianity. Such Christians deny this of course, exclaiming that they do obey Jesus' teachings – in their hearts. They'll say that Jesus never expected us to actually implement those teachings, that they were more or less spiritual insights: We can persecute and kill, so long as we do it with a pure heart.

Leaders of the radical right give all manner of creative reasons for disobeying Jesus' teachings. This is especially apparent when they pick and choose scriptures that condone sexism, oppression, war, slavery, domestic violence and the domination of others.

Most damaging of all to our faith – and to Christians everywhere, in the long run – rightwing leaders are inserting the word "Jesus" into their ugliest campaigns in the US and around the world....

Monday, December 20, 2004

This Season, Greetings Are at Issue
RALEIGH, N.C. — This year, as Christmas season swung into gear, Pastor Patrick Wooden's followers fanned out to shopping malls across Raleigh to deliver a muscular message of holiday cheer: As Christian shoppers, they would like to be greeted with the phrase "Merry Christmas" — not a bland "Happy Holidays" — and stores that failed to do so would risk losing their business....

...In Oklahoma and Miami, local skirmishes have erupted over the display of nativity scenes on government property. A California man has called for a boycott of Macy's and Bloomingdale's department stores, demanding the phrase "Merry Christmas" be used. In Denver, the mayor's attempt to remove "Merry Christmas" from a light display raised such a howl of protest that he reversed his decision....

...Conservative Americans feel ready to push back against "the secularists or the humanists or the elitists" who dominate popular culture, said the Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, which is based in Raleigh.

"It's a cultural war. We are in the thick of it," Creech said. "It's not so much an attack on us. It's an attack on Christ."

Throughout history, religious people have fretted over the holiday's secular aspects, said Penne Restad, a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Christmas in America: A History."

Created by the Roman Catholic Church in the 4th century, the celebration of the nativity coincided with pre-Christian feasts, allowing observant Christians to "then go out the door and participate in Saturnalia," Restad said.

In pre-Colonial days, English authorities looked on the holiday as a riot of drunkenness and hooliganism. American Puritans rejected it completely, preferring to get up and go to work. Not until the 1820s and '30s, with the holiday "getting rowdier and rowdier and more destructive," did Americans redefine it as a safe and private family time, Restad said — the "old-fashioned Christmas" celebrated in carols and Currier & Ives prints.

Karal Ann Marling, author of "Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday," called complaints about secularization "complete and utter bunk."

"If you think Christmas meant the baby Jesus in the past, it didn't," said Marling, a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota....

...On the day after Thanksgiving, the church ran a full-page advertisement in the Raleigh News and Observer, urging Christians to "spend their hard-earned dollars with merchants who include the greeting Merry Christmas."...

...Wooden, 43, considers the campaign such a success that he has already set aside money in the church budget — full-page ads cost about $7,600 — to buy a similar advertisement next year. Fresh off the fierce debate over same-sex marriage, which he opposes, he says condemnation from the left does not trouble him. On the contrary, he said: "It seems to me the greater the persecution, the stronger the church."

As far as complaints from people of other religions go, Wooden looks at it this way: An ice-cream vendor doesn't have to like every flavor he sells.

"There's one group of people who get bullied all the time, and that's Christians," he said. "I know what it is like to be bullied. It is apartheid in reverse — the majority is being bullied by the minority."...

Last night I had an interesting conversation with a friend who works on Capitol Hill. He was recently part of a Congressional delegation that went to India. The delegation was mainly Republicans.

They spoke to a lot of Indian government people and the message from them was very clear, and in a nutshell it was this: We don't much care about America. He said they were very polite but almost indifferent. Maybe matter-of-fact is a better description. The conversation went something like this:

We consider ourselves as in competition with China for leadership in the new century. That's our focus and frankly, you have made it very difficult for us to deal with you. We find your approach to international affairs ridiculous. The invasion of Iraq was insane. You've encouraged the very things you say you were trying to fix - terrorism and instability. Your attitude to Iran is ridiculous. You need to engage with Iran. We are. We are bemused by your hypocrisy. You lecture the world about dealing with dictators and you deal with Pakistan. We are very sorry for your losses from the 9/11 terror attacks. Welcome to our world. You threaten us with sanctions for not signing the non-proliferation treaty, but you continue to be nuclear armed and to investigate new weapons. You expect us to neglect our own security because you want us to. We don't care about sanctions. ...

War on the Cheap
Greg Rund was a freshman at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 when two students shot and killed a teacher, a dozen of their fellow students and themselves. Mr. Rund survived that horror, but he wasn't able to survive the war in Iraq. The 21-year-old Marine lance corporal was killed on Dec. 11 in Falluja.

The people who were so anxious to launch the war in Iraq are a lot less enthusiastic about properly supporting the troops who are actually fighting, suffering and dying in it. Corporal Rund was on his second tour of duty in Iraq. Because of severe military personnel shortages, large numbers of troops are serving multiple tours in the war zone, and many are having their military enlistments involuntarily extended.

Troops approaching the end of their tours in Iraq are frequently dealt the emotional body blow of unexpected orders blocking their departure for home. "I've never seen so many grown men cry," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former infantry platoon leader who founded Operation Truth, an advocacy group for soldiers and veterans.

"Soldiers will do whatever you ask them to do," said Mr. Rieckhoff. "But when you tell them the finish line is here, and then you keep moving it back every time they get five meters away from it, it starts to really wear on them. It affects morale."

We don't have enough troops because we are fighting the war on the cheap. The Bush administration has refused to substantially expand the volunteer military and there is no public support for a draft. So the same troops head in and out of Iraq, and then back in again, as if through a revolving door. That naturally heightens their chances of being killed or wounded....

...From the earliest planning stages until now, the war in Iraq has been a tragic exercise in official incompetence. The original rationale for the war was wrong. The intelligence was wrong. The estimates of required troop strength were wrong. The war hawks' guesses about the response of the Iraqi people were wrong. The cost estimates were wrong, and on and on....

Saturday, December 18, 2004

US military sees sharp fall in black recruits
...For years, black Americans have formed the backbone of the all-volunteer US army, filling a quarter of its ranks, though blacks account for only 13 per cent of the population. Blacks are more likely to treat the army as a lifelong career; a third of senior sergeants and non-commissioned officers are black. Suddenly, that is changing.

Apart from a sudden fall in the past two months in recruiting for the part-time National Guard, army recruitment as a whole has held more or less steady this year, with the help of increased enlistment bonuses and an early call-up for some youths originally due to enter basic training next year.

But the proportion of black recruits into the army was only 15.6 per cent, down from 22.3 per cent in the fiscal year 2001. In the part-time army reserve, the drop is sharper.

Army officials decline to speculate about the collapse in black recruiting, instead noting what they call a positive development, that army numbers will now reflect the make-up of society better.

Behind the scenes, there is more concern, according to Prof David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

"If there are fewer blacks coming in - and it is blacks who stay in and become NCOs - then six, seven, eight, nine years down the road, you can anticipate a shortage of sergeants," he said.

Prof Charles Moskos, an expert on the military and race at Northwestern University in Chicago, said the drop-off began even before the Iraq war, with the election of President George W Bush in 2000 in the face of overwhelming black antipathy, an attitude that lingers to this day....

Friday, December 17, 2004

Guard Reports Serious Drop in Enlistment
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.

In addition, the head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, said on Thursday that he needed $20 billion to replace arms and equipment destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan or left there for other Army and Air Guard units to use, so that returning reservists will have enough equipment to deal with emergencies at home.

The sharp decline in recruiting is significant because National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers now make up nearly 40 percent of the 148,000 troops in Iraq, and are a vital source for filling the ranks, particularly those who perform essential support tasks, like truck drivers and military police.

General Blum said the main reason for the Army National Guard's recruiting shortfall was a sharp reduction in the number of recruits joining the Guard and Reserve when they leave active duty. In peacetime the commitment means maintaining their ties to the military with a weekend of service a month and two weeks in the summer.

Over the last 30 years, General Blum said, the Guard has counted on these soldiers with prior military service for about half of its recruits. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, however, many of these soldiers have been hesitant to join the Guard because of the increasing likelihood that America's citizen-soldiers will be activated and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan for up to 12 months. Indeed, many of the active-duty soldiers the Army would like to enlist in the Reserves have recently fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and some have no inclination to do so again...

...General Blum's remarks come just a few days after the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, told The Dallas Morning News that the Army Reserve recruiting was in a "precipitous decline" that if unchecked could inspire renewed debate over the draft. General Helmly told the newspaper that he personally opposed reviving the draft....

...Some military personnel specialists offered a much more pessimistic forecast and said the lower recruiting numbers were the harbingers of tougher times to come.

"I don't think this is an aberration," said David R. Segal, a military sociologist who directs the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "I think we're going to see significant shortfalls in recruitment, and I think we're to begin to see retention problems. We're also going to see increasing concerns at the state level about how the Guard will man itself and perform its state missions." ...

A Flood of Troubled Soldiers Is in the Offing, Experts Predict
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - The nation's hard-pressed health care system for veterans is facing a potential deluge of tens of thousands of soldiers returning from Iraq with serious mental health problems brought on by the stress and carnage of war, veterans' advocates and military doctors say.

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans. Because about one million American troops have served so far in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Pentagon figures, some experts predict that the number eventually requiring mental health treatment could exceed 100,000....

Thursday, December 16, 2004

2004: The Year of 'The Passion'
...If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O'Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a "holiday tree" in the lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

The power of this minority within the Christian majority comes from its exaggerated claims on the Bush election victory. It is enhanced further by a news culture, especially on television, that gives the Mel Gibson wing of Christianity more say than other Christian voices and that usually ignores minority religions altogether. This is not just a Fox phenomenon. Something is off when NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," mainstream TV shows both, invite religious leaders to discuss "values" in the aftermath of the election and limit that discussion to all-male panels composed exclusively of either evangelical ministers or politicians with pseudo-spiritual credentials. Does Mr. Falwell, who after 9/11 blamed Al Qaeda's attack partly on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," speak for any sizable group of American Christians? Does the Rev. Al Sharpton, booked on TV as a "balance" to Mr. Falwell, do so either? Mr. Sharpton doesn't even have a congregation; like Mr. Falwell, he is a politician first, a religious leader second (or maybe fourth or fifth).

Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice — fundamentalist." That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers — or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves — and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has attributed to "values" crusaders since the election. "There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners," says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."...

Christians and “christianists”
The civilization of Christian Europe was built by people whose purpose was not that of constructing a “Christian civilization”. We owe it to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity. Interview with Rémi Brague

...For these people, the Church must “defend certain values”, and not compromise on the moral laws. But do they themselves follow them? Not always … They want an organization with a firm line, with a “number one” well established. In the end, I ask myself if they don’t dream of a Church in the mould of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union....

Ex-Military Lawyers Object to Bush Cabinet Nominee
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Several former high-ranking military lawyers say they are discussing ways to oppose President Bush's nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be attorney general, asserting that Mr. Gonzales's supervision of legal memorandums that appeared to sanction harsh treatment of detainees, even torture, showed unsound legal judgment.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination are expected to begin next month. While Mr. Gonzales is expected to be confirmed, objections from former generals and admirals would be a setback and an embarrassment for him and the White House.

Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000 before he retired, said that while Mr. Gonzales might be a lawyer of some stature, "I think the role that he played in the one thing that I am familiar with is tremendously shortsighted."

Mr. Gonzales, as White House counsel, oversaw the drafting of several confidential legal memorandums that critics said sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and opened the door to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

A memorandum prepared under Mr. Gonzales's supervision by a legal task force concluded that Mr. Bush was not bound either by an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation.

The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful." Another memorandum said the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan.

Mr. Hutson, who is dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., said that Mr. Gonzales "was not thinking about the impact of his behavior on U.S. troops in this war and others to come."

"He was not thinking about the United States' history in abiding by international law, especially in the wartime context," he said. "For that reason, some of us think he is a poor choice to be attorney general."...

Between Iraq and a Hard Place
Griping among the troops is as old as armed conflict, illustrated most memorably by cartoonist Bill Mauldin's "Willie and Joe" characters during World War II. But something more than that is happening now in Iraq with what appears to be growing resistance from the troops.

Evidence includes numbers of deserters (reportedly in the thousands), resignations of reserve officers, lawsuits by those whose duty period has been involuntarily extended, and a refusal to go on dangerous missions without proper equipment. There's also been a willingness at grunt level to publicly challenge the Pentagon — as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld found out recently in a trip to the war zone, where he got an earful about unarmored humvees.

While some don't see much defiance — and, in fact, have been surprised by the depth of solidarity — others see an unusual amount of tension surfacing for an all-volunteer military force.

"What is driving the resistance is the same thing that drove it during Vietnam — a lack of trust in the civilian leadership and a sense that the uniformed leaders are not standing up for the forces," says retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a military analyst with the Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington. Colonel Smith doesn't expect the kind of "fragging" incidents that occurred in Vietnam where soldiers attacked their own officers. "This force is too professional," he says. "But the lack of trust and the inequity of the tours will very likely be reflected in the numbers of Guard and reservists who vote no-confidence with their feet."

That already appears to be happening. The Army National Guard is short 5,000 new citizen-soldiers....

...The number of officers wanting to resign from the Army Reserve has jumped as well. And according to a recent report on CBS's "60 Minutes," the Defense Department acknowledges that more than 5,500 service personnel have deserted since the Iraq war began....

...Legal challenges to military authority appear to be increasing as well, with more use of civilian attorneys than was seen in Vietnam. "It's very much in evidence," says Eugene Fidell, a former military lawyer who heads the National Institute of Military Justice. Mr. Fidell just finished teaching the first course on military issues at Harvard Law School since 1970....

...But they also note a growing trend for GIs to speak out and to find leverage points to protect their interests — including personal safety. "I am amazed that it is not greater," says retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner. "The war continues to go badly. Their equipment is in bad shape. Supply problems continue. Tours are extended. Many are on a second or third deployment to a combat zone. I would expect a louder voice."

A key issue for war planners is whether any of this adversely effects individual morale and unit performance. That remains an open question, particularly as the war goes on and its original rationale (weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda) fades....

A band of khaki liars
...Why does the Pentagon lie so blatantly? It's the ingrained nature of a beast with a $400 billion annual habit to protect. It must always put its shiniest boot forward to protect its agenda, and the truth be damned.

I recently reported how the Army Recruiting Command was having a serious shortfall in enlistment and how that could impact on troop strength in Iraq. Within a day of my story's release, the Recruiting Command put out an order that read: "The daily production report [which I incidentally based some of my article on] ... is now considered a 'For Official Use Only' ... Dissemination of that report with[out] the approval of this HQ ... is prohibited." ...

Save the world, ignore global warming
By Bjorn Lomborg

Global warming has become the obsession of our time. From governments and campaigners meeting for the climate summit in Buenos Aires right now we hear the incessant admonition: making global warming our first priority is the moral test of our age.

Yet they are wrong. Global warming is real and caused by CO2. The trouble is that the climate models show we can do very little about the warming. Even if everyone (including the United States) did Kyoto and stuck to it throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming by just six years in 2100.

Likewise, the economic models tell us that the cost is substantial. The cost of Kyoto compliance is at least $150billion a year. For comparison, the UN estimates that half that amount could permanently solve the most pressing humanitarian problems in the world: it could buy clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single person in the world.

Global warming will mainly harm the developing countries, because they are poorer and therefore less able to handle climate changes. However, even the most pessimistic forecasts from the UN expect the average person in the developing countries to be richer in 2100 than we are now.

So action on global warming is basically a very costly way of doing very little for much richer people far into the future. We need to ask ourselves if this indeed should be our first priority....

Cargo Flights Added to Cut Risky Land Trips
WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 - Responding to the threat of roadside bombings and ambushes of American ground convoys in Iraq, the Air Force is sharply expanding its airlift of equipment and supplies to bases inside the country to reduce the amount of military cargo hauled over land routes, Air Force officials said Tuesday.

Dozens of Air Force C-130 and C-17 transport planes, and contracted commercial aircraft, are ferrying about 450 tons of cargo a day, including spare parts, food, water, medical supplies and other matériel that normally moves by truck or trailer, a 29 percent increase in the past month.

Even trucks are sometimes shipped in by air.

In just the past month, the increased air operations have kept more than 400 trucks and about 1,050 drivers with military escorts off the most dangerous roads in Iraq, said an Air Force spokesman, Lt. Col. Mike Caldwell. American military convoys have been suffering about 100 deaths and injuries a month.

The increased airlift operations started in early November at the urging of Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, who told reporters on Tuesday that he threw "a little fit" when he learned on a visit to Iraq last month that air and ground commanders were not sufficiently focused on finding ways the Air Force could reduce the number of ground convoys, especially in the treacherous Sunni-dominated areas north and west of Baghdad.

"Taking the trucks off the most dangerous routes where we have most of the trouble has become a goal," General Jumper said at a breakfast meeting. "We're all working toward that."

Flying cargo is more expensive than hauling supplies overland, but the Air Force's decision reflects the judgment of air and ground commanders that the insurgency will continue to pose a lethal threat to American supply lines, and that extraordinary steps must be taken to ensure the safe flow of cargo and to reduce casualties....

Uncertainty, Fear and Fundamentalism
A Gallup Poll released last month indicates that 34% of Americans believe that the Bible is "the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word." Far more interesting than that number, at least in my opinion, is the trend. In February 2001, only 27% indicated that they so believed. That represents a 26% increase (if I'm doing my math right) of Biblical absolutists in America in merely three years. Yes, these polls do have a margin of error. But these results, even assuming the maximum amount of error, are statistically significant....

...It is become cliché to say that the events of September 11, 2001 changed everything. Nevertheless, I do think that the terrorists attacks and the consequent rise in public fears that massive violence and destruction could occur at any moment has been an important cause in the rising popularity of fundamentalism. In times of fear and crisis, people yearn for certainty, assurance and purpose.

Fundamentalism provides those psychological benefits. The Bible provides all historical, scientific, moral and theological answers. Fundamentalism tells us that God is in complete control; that the wicked will be punished in the end; that righteousness will eventually prevail....

Camp American
Where God's Truth and Patriotism Go Hand-in-Hand

...Camp American™ will help students and adults understand the Constitution and the founding fathers original intent, and the Christian principles upon which our founders built this nation. Camp American™ will also help your teen recognize and refute false teachings and morally bankrupt philosophies now so prevalent in American culture. Students will discover the deception of evolution, the importance of purity and morals in a free society, and the pagan connection to the radical environmental movement. Your teen will learn the importance of prayer and action. Most importantly, students will learn that in order to restore America, we must return America to Christ....

Document: Intel Agents Who Saw Detainee Abuse Were Threatened
A memo from the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency reveals that two DIA agents who witnessed abuse of detainees in Iraq were threatened by the interrogators. ...

Nearly 900 children have lost a parent in Iraq
Sad to the depths of his 4-year-old soul, Jack Shanaberger knew what he didn't want to be when he grows up: a father.

"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," the child solemnly told his mother after his father, Staff Sgt. Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Fort Pierce, Fla., was killed March 23 in an ambush in Iraq.

On that terrible day, Jack and his four siblings joined the ranks of the largely overlooked American casualties who, until now, have gone uncounted. Although almost daily official announcements tally the war dead, the collateral damage to the children left behind has not been detailed.

But, from Defense Department casualty reports, obituaries and accounts in hometown newspapers, and family interviews, Scripps Howard News Service has identified nearly 900 U.S. children who have lost a parent in the war, from the start of the conflict in March 2003 through November, when a total of 1,256 troops had died.

Although comparably specific historical data is not available for other U.S. wars, military experts said the proportionally higher number of American children left bereaved by the Iraq war is unprecedented.

"This is a new state of affairs we have to confront," said Charles Moskos, a leading military sociologist and Northwestern University professor.

Overall, Americans in uniform today are far more likely to be married and have children than in the military of the past, Moskos and others said. And the reliance in Iraq on reserve forces - who tend to be older and even more settled than active-duty soldiers - also means more offspring at home. ...

..."As much as we are concerned about veterans' programs, we now have to be concerned about orphan programs," Moskos said. "This is the first time we have crossed this threshold."

According to the Scripps research, more than 40 percent of the 1,256 war dead through November were married, and 429 had children. At least half of those youngsters were 10 years old or younger. Among the parents who died were six women soldiers who had borne a total of 10 children among them - another historic first for females in the U.S. military.

Perhaps most heartbreaking are the more than 40 troops who died without ever seeing their children. At least 34 wives were pregnant - four with twins - when their husbands died, and another15 had babies while their spouses were deployed. While some of the latter were able to return home on paternity leave, most died before they could.

Among those who never once held their babies was Army 1st Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, 25, of Abilene, Texas, who was killed in March when a roadside bomb hit his armored personnel carrier near Habbaniyah. In his uniform pocket, Hufstedler carried a sonogram picture of his unborn daughter, the only image he would ever have of Grace Ashley, who arrived six weeks after his death....

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

'I don't know how it works'
Dr Huang Hongyun cultivates the cells of aborted foetuses and injects them into the brains and spines of his patients. His method is controversial, but his results have led hundreds of westerners to his Beijing surgery. Jonathan Watts was given unprecedented access to the doctor and his patients

...None of these claims has been proven to western scientific standards, but Huang's willingness to think the unthinkable in order to cure the incurable is inspiring hope; so much hope that patients are putting aside ethical qualms, paying tens of thousands of dollars and flying to Beijing to act as his guinea pigs.

Among them is Van Golden, a Christian, anti-abortion Texan who has sold his house so that he can travel to communist, atheist China and have Huang inject a million cells from the nasal area of a foetus into his spine. According to Golden's doctors, his spine was damaged beyond repair in a car crash last Christmas. The damage to his nervous system was so bad that he has been in a wheelchair and racked by spasms ever since. But Golden refused to give up, even if it meant having to compromise his values. "This is the only place that offered us any hope," he says. "Everyone else offered only to help make me sufficient in that chair. But the chair is not my destiny. It is not ordained." ...

posted by Me | 4:38 PM

Details of Marines Mistreating Prisoners in Iraq Are Revealed
WASHINGTON — Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners last year, burned and tortured other detainees with electrical shocks, and warned a Navy corpsman they would kill him if he treated any injured Iraqis, according to military documents made public Tuesday.

The latest revelations of prisoner abuse cases, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit against the government, involved previously unknown incidents in which 11 Marines were punished for abusing detainees. Military officials indicated that they had investigated 13 other cases, but deemed them unsubstantiated. Four investigations are pending.

Military superiors handed down sentences of up to a year in confinement after finding Marines guilty of offenses ranging from assault to "cruelty and mistreatment," the documents show.

The new documents are the latest in a series of reports, e-mails and other records that the ACLU has obtained to bolster its contention that the abuse of prisoners goes far beyond the handful of soldiers charged with abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq....

posted by Me | 11:42 AM

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Bob Don't Know Diddy
Post-Election Reflections on Polls and Other Stuff

...If the experts are correct, the 2004 election results mean we now live in a country where morality is apparently the major concern of people. Am I wrong, or is the same thing not true in Iran? And if our morality is in fundamental conflict with their morality, which side will be willing to sacrifice more to obtain what they view as their just end? I can tell you it ain't us.

Back in 1986 I talked Penthouse magazine into giving me an assignment to write the story: "How to Get a Date in Revolutionary Iran." The premise was that hormones are hormones, and those wacky kids in Tehran, most of whom could still remember the Shah, had to be finding some way to meet members of the opposite sex. So I headed off to Iran to find out the truth. If you are interested in such stuff, the only time a single man and woman not from the same family could be together in private back then was in a taxi (he being the driver), so all the teenage boys who had or could borrow cars turned them into taxis. This, of course, put all the power in the hands of the woman since she could see him but he had to take pot luck.

I eventually finished the piece and decided to go see the war since I had been in Beirut and Angola, but had never seen trench warfare, which is what I was told they had going in Iran. So I took a taxi to the front, introduced myself to the local commander, who had gone, as I recall, to Iowa State, and spent a couple days waiting for the impending human wave attack. That attack was to be conducted primarily with 11-and 12-year-old boys as troops, nearly all of them unarmed. There were several thousand kids and their job was to rise out of the trench, praising Allah, run across No Man's Land, be killed by the Iraqi machine gunners, then go directly to Paradise, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 dinars. And that's exactly what happened in a battle lasting less than 10 minutes. None of the kids fired a shot or made it all the way to the other side. And when I asked the purpose of this exercise, I was told it was to demoralize the cowardly Iraqi soldiers.

It was the most horrific event I have ever seen, and I once covered a cholera epidemic in Bangladesh that killed 40,000 people.

Waiting those two nights for the attack was surreal. Some kids acted as though nothing was wrong while others cried and puked. But when the time came to praise Allah and enter Paradise, not a single boy tried to stay behind.

Now put this in a current context. What effective limit is there to the number of Islamic kids willing to blow themselves to bits? There is no limit, which means that a Bush Doctrine can't really stand in that part of the world. But of course President Bush, who may think he pulled the switch on a couple hundred Death Row inmates in Texas, has probably never seen a combat death. He doesn't get it and he'll proudly NEVER get it.

Welcome to the New Morality.

posted by Me | 8:21 PM

what progressives want
I think it can be broken down to this: Progressive and liberal Christians want to have conservative Christians to say to them, "I respect your viewpoints, and I maintain that there is a place for you within Orthodox Christianity."

I think that's it. Simple, eh? Then we want to be treated like those conservative Christians believe what they say. That's it. I don't need conservative Christians to quit being conservative. I just want to be a part of the 'Christian' club sometimes...or at least treated like I'm a welcome member.

Beyond that, arguing till we're blue in the face is pretty fun, sometimes. I don't mind having a discussion about evolution, or gay marriage, or whatever the issue of the day is as long as we can come back to that one unifying principle. That my social and political beliefs don't negate for me the possibility of fellowship with people....

posted by Me | 8:16 PM

Post Election Thoughts

It is a rare thing in human history that one can experience the rise and fall of a great nation in one's own lifetime. It took more than a thousand years for ancient China to come and go, six hundred for Rome, perhaps two hundred each for Spain and England. In the case of America, it has happened in about fifty years.

Immediately following World War II, we were the most powerful nation on earth. Our technology was unrivalled, our production unprecedented, our self-image secure, and we were held in high respect by the peoples of the world. Today, we are on the way down. Our standard of living is decreasing, our output is diminishing, our self-image is in tatters, and we are the most disliked, if not outright hated, nation in the world.

What has happened? I think it comes down to three things: a loss of our spiritual grounding, a breakdown of our political system, and the results of irresponsible spending. As my father used to say, if we live too high on the hog for too long, eventually we are going to have to pay for it.

Loss of spiritual grounding

This does not mean we are any less 'religious'. What it does mean is that too many of our citizens have been content to lapse into false religions. The huge interest in astrology, the lottery and other forms of magic is bad enough. But the real problem is that large numbers of Christians have simply begun to worship false idols - belief in Biblical literalism, thus making the Bible itself an idol, belief in a false God who can be persuaded by us to do something if we do something in return (a vision rejected by Judaism and Jesus more than two millennia ago), and belief in our own superiority which we justify to ourselves by claiming to be the only 'children of God'.

When Thomas Althizer and Harvey Cox announced the 'death of God' in the 1960s, they were really calling people to reject the old, magical, God-with-a-beard-in-Heaven kind of God. At that time, most people in Europe understood what was being said and refused to go along with the false Christianity that had held sway there for hundreds of years. They left the churches in droves. But in America many people instead retreated into the refuge that the false God provides - certainty in our own righteousness, bliss in our own ignorance, safety if we blindly follow the God of wrath and judgment and Laws. Today more than 75% of Americans claim to believe in the virgin birth and a physical Heaven and Hell, and almost as many insist their God created the earth in seven days.

The result is a nation deeply divided between people who are concerned about real-life issues - war and peace, social justice, the health and welfare of the people - and people who are concerned, instead, about 'values' -- by which they mean dependence on a magical God, adherence to ancient taboos, the necessity for everyone to believe as they do, and safety in raw (though often hidden) power. Such a nation cannot prosper, because its prevailing religion is internally corrupt, divisive, and an offence to the God of love and justice. ...

posted by Me | 3:13 PM

Listening and Talking to God About Invading Other Countries
I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me:

(1) That we could not give them [the Philippines] back to Spain-that would be cowardly and dishonorable;

(2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany-our commercial rivals in the Orient-that would be bad business and discreditable;

(3) that we could not leave them to themselves-they were unfit for self-government-and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and

(4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the ..War Department map-maker, and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States (pointing to a large wall map), and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!
-- General James Rusling, "Interview with President William McKinley," The Christian Advocate 22 January 1903, 17. Reprinted in Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader

...One critical citizen satirized McKinley's war:

G is for guns
That McKinley has sent
To teach Filipinos
What Jesus Christ meant.

The bible thumpers of the time praised McKinley's will in overcoming Satan (Filipinos, not Arabs) with military force. Now, 106 years later, as scientists map the human genetic structure and discover secrets of the galaxy that date back thousands of centuries, the descendents of the religious zealots that counseled McKinley win court battles to validate creationism and push Armageddon and Rapture as themes of US Middle East policy....

...In October, Robertson, the aging Baptist Maharishi, told some 4,000 plus pilgrims in Jerusalem's convention center that devious Muslims intended to foil "God's plan" to let Israel hold on to its lands. (Ha'aratz Oct 4)

Robertson interpreted Islam's intention "to destroy Israel and take the land from the Jews and give East Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat, [the Palestinian Authority Chairman who died in November] as Satan's plan to prevent the return of Jesus Christ the Lord."...

posted by Me | 10:10 AM

"War Is Not A Noble Enterprise"
An interview with New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges on the Iraq war, the trauma facing returning soldiers and the killing of innocent Iraqis.

...Morality does play deeply into that sense of trauma, because when you’re in a combat situation (and I think you have to go there to understand), your reactions have to be instantaneous. If you hear a sound behind a door, you don’t have time to ask questions, so often you shoot first and ask questions later. And this we have seen in Iraq, where soldiers and Marines at road blocks have fired on cars filled with children and families that they initially feared were hostile.

When you are in a combat situation like that, you realize how easy it is to commit murder, how easy it is to commit atrocity, because you are so deathly afraid — and with good reason. But the consequences are devastating, because what you have done is to shed innocent blood, and often the blood of children. So you bring back not only the trauma of the violence, but that deep darkness that you must carry within you for the rest of your life — that you have been responsible for the death of innocents.

So it isn’t just an issue of trauma; it is, as well, an issue of morality. This is a horrible burden to inflict, especially on a young life. It’s why war should always be waged as a last resort, because the costs are so tremendous, not only to families who lose loved ones and will spend the rest of their lives grieving, but for those who return and for the rest of their lives bear these emotional and psychological burdens.

People cope with that in different ways. Some of course deny it. Some, even combat veterans, will try to perpetuate the mythology of glory and honor and heroism and patriotism. Others, who have more courage and more honesty will confront what they did by trying to live a life of atonement, by seeking a kind of redemption for the acts they carried out. I think that leads them to a much healthier response, and hopefully sets many on the road to recovery. I think we saw this with the conflict in Vietnam, although not exclusively with Vietnam, because my father and all my uncles fought in World War II — the supposedly “good” war — and they hated war when they came back....

...Abu Ghraib is the natural consequence of war and has happened in every single war that has ever been fought. What you are doing in war is turning human beings into objects either to provide gratification or to be destroyed, or both. And almost no one is immune from that — the contagion of the crowd sees to that.

In wartime, perversion and hedonism spiral out of control. The comradeship of soldiering seeks to turn the very act of love into something akin to defecation. This is because the great “that which cannot be subsumed into communal life” is love. So much of the psychosis of war involves an active effort to destroy feelings of tenderness and compassionate love.

In a wartime society, the moral order is flipped upside down; prostitution, rape, and abuse all rise as the levels of violence rises. That happened in every conflict I was in. In Serbia, for instance, as the violence proliferated you also had a proliferation of pornography and snuff films. It always goes hand in hand, because what you are destroying is the humanity of the other; you are turning the other into an object, which is precisely what torture or pornography does.

So what we saw in Abu Ghraib was a window into the kind of perversion that is always the case in war. This flies in the face of the image that we are given of war by the entertainment industry, or even quasi-historians like Stephen Ambrose who want to ennoble war.

War is not a noble enterprise. I’m not a pacifist; I think there are times when war is a sad inevitability. But it is certainly not noble. ...

...One of the frustrating things for those of us who have spent so much time in war zones is to come back and see how those who are guiltiest — those who pushed the country into war, who told the lies that perpetuated the war — are never held accountable. And those who suffer the most, those who endure the trauma and have to live with the memories for the rest of their lives, are blamed unjustly.

I think that part of the tragedy of Vietnam is that we blame the wrong people for the war. It’s not the fault of the 19-year-old kids who were sent there. It’s the fault of the politicians who sent them. And years after the war, people who should be culpable — the Henry Kissingers, the Robert McNamaras — are our elder statesmen writing big thick tomes about diplomacy or their years of government service. ...

...I don’t know that there’s an organized force that can stand up to the allure of war, which gives us a sense of empowerment — allows us to be part of a cause, to ennoble ourselves, to rise above our small stations in life....

posted by Me | 10:04 AM

For safer world, legalize drugs
The recent reduction of the harsh mandatory sentencing once common to New York drug laws makes an interesting combination when thought of with the concept of legalized, taxable gambling. I say that because the real solution to the drug problem this country faces has little to do with how much time some lightweight drug pusher or user is sentenced to spend behind bars. It is not about finding better ways to get the big guys and put them where they belong. That's all a waste of time.

What we need to do is legalize all the drugs and face the consequences. That's right. With drug dealers put out of business, I am sure those consequences would be much less dangerous - and much less expensive - to our society. Legalization could not even begin to approach the downside in the illegal dope world - torture, murder, beatings and sexual exploitation.

Drug money is very nearly the petroleum of the most violent criminal world. It is the fuel that keeps the destructive engine running. Drug violence dramatically influences the nature of public health. The violence perpetuated by drug gangs fighting over turf is one of the bloody burdens the lower class must bear. The health costs of treating those with gunshot wounds, whether actual members of the trade or innocent bystanders, must amount to hundreds of millions over the last 30 years. All those bandages, all of those operations, all of that rehabilitation, all of those crutches, prescriptions, painkillers and wheelchairs....

posted by Me | 9:03 AM

One Christian feeling hijacked by politics
... I live in a country that is increasingly eager to challenge its citizens' loyalty, among people of faith increasingly determined to dispute the faith of others. Some people who call themselves Christians - and some church leaders - are beginning to redefine Christianity in such a way as to exclude worshipers with whom they disagree. I fear a religion in which ideology is more important than theology.

If someone - like me - who has worshiped as a Christian for more than 50 years suddenly feels afraid of the extremes of that religion - what must it be like for those of different beliefs, or of unbelief?

My 14-year-old son has attended two bar mitzvahs this year, and I'm thrilled for him to witness the serious commitment his friends have made to Judaism. I wonder how included those boys feel in our suddenly very Christian nation, in their suddenly very Christian public schools, football stadiums, and town meetings.

If I question political decisions, am I un-American? If I don't agree with a fundamentalist, am I un-Christian?

There used to be two things that you didn't talk about for fear of causing offense: politics and religion. Today the two are so intertwined, you can't talk of one without the other. And when you do, them's fightin' words, pardner. Nowadays, so many people are looking for a fight.

I'm not. Neither am I afraid to pray in public. But I am afraid of my faith being hijacked to promote someone else's political agenda. I am afraid of my faith being used as a weapon in a crusade against anyone who dares to think or believe differently.

I'm not giving up my faith. I plan to keep playing those hymns. And I will continue to pray for our country and to give thanks for our food, our family, and our friends. Twice on Sunday, and at every meal. But not in public.

I don't want to be mistaken for a hijacker.

posted by Me | 8:52 AM

Iraq's besieged Christians weigh taking up arms, fleeing into exile
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Leaders of the ever-dwindling Christian population in Iraq say bombings of their churches and attacks against their communities may force them to take up guns.

Two more churches were bombed in Mosul last week, the latest attacks, and some Christians say extremist Muslims are terrorizing them with the intent of ousting them and seizing their houses and belongings.

Iraq is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, made up largely of ethnic Assyrians, an ancient people who speak a modern form of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. But as the turmoil increases, hundreds of Christian families are leaving each week for exile in Syria and Turkey.

Some Christians have called for the establishment of a "safe haven" in Iraq's north, where they would be protected by special Iraqi army units. Others are threatening to add a Christian militia to Iraq's already militarized society.

"Assyrians need security, so we need a legal army within the Iraqi army to protect ourselves," said Michael Benjamin, a leader of the Assyrian Democratic Movement.

Said another Assyrian leader, Yonadem Kanna, "We do not want to transform our movement into a militia, but if we need to we can arm more than 10,000 people."

Christians are only a sliver of Iraq's population, but their leaders argue that driving them from Iraq would make it unlikely Iraq could ever develop into a nation that values religious pluralism and tolerance. Estimates of how many Christians have left Iraq in recent months range from 10,000 to 40,000 people....

...Many Christians have collaborated with U.S. forces, hoping that Iraq will become a democratic and free secular state. Their links to Americans, often as translators, have put them under threat. Some anti-U.S. Sunni Muslims warn that anyone aiding the Americans should be killed, or even beheaded. ...

... "The Christians have no future here," said Athnaiel Isaac, a 23-year-old deacon in Baghdad. "We may be under the same pressures that made the Jews leave Iraq (following World War II)."...

...Ironically, many Christians are facing worse times than under Saddam Hussein's secular regime. Saddam viewed Christians as non-threatening and elevated a Christian, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, as the public face of his regime. But he also barred Christians from building new churches and kept strict controls on them.

Following Saddam's ouster last year, many Christians were heartened by an interim constitution that guaranteed basic religious freedom.

But as violence increased, including kidnappings of some rich Christians and beheadings of others who worked for the U.S. military, some Assyrians demanded creation of a "safe haven" in land currently governed autonomously by Iraqi Kurds....

posted by Me | 7:17 AM

Monday, December 13, 2004

Unrest may spawn "Iraqi Hitler" - Iraq president
DUBAI, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Long-term instability in Iraq could give birth to an "Iraqi Hitler" if citizens continue to feel humiliated and despondent, Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar said in remarks published on Monday.

Daily bombings and kidnappings have plagued Iraq since last year's U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein and the relentless Sunni-led insurgency has crippled reconstruction and development projects in the country.

"This could in the long term create an environment in which an Iraqi Hitler could emerge like the one created by the defeat of Germany and the humiliation of Germans in World War I," Yawar told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper. ...

posted by Me | 2:52 PM

Moral Values and Torture
...To achieve this goal, we are willing to participate in immoral and unbiblical actions. The angel of darkness, which clothes itself in light, has seduced us into devouring and torturing those created in the image of God, all the while claiming that the blood we spill is the will of the Almighty and we are but God’s instruments.

It is bad enough that the abuses of Abu Ghraib have been swept under the rug. The shock expressed when the story made headline news has been conveniently forgotten, reducing justice to the scapegoating of a few low-level military personal, thus constructing a false reality that this was but an aberration instigated by a few “rotten apples.”

This present administration has continued to insist that the horrific photos we witnessed were but isolated incidents, and the atmosphere that contributed to these abuses has been rectified. Although we continue to publicly proclaim our respect for international law and the Geneva Convention, privately, we continue to participate in human rights violations.

Last Tuesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross released a report charging that the prisoners held at Guantánamo are being subjected to abuses that are “tantamount to torture.”

The mistreatment of prisoners in Guantánamo resembles the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. They have been exposed to sexual humiliation, prolonged isolation or prolonged “stress positions,” and beatings.

What is new in the torture chambers at Guantánamo is the use of medical personnel during the “interrogation” process, in complete violation of the Hippocratic Oath. The only progress (if you can call it that) reported by the 2004 report over the 2003 findings is that female interrogators have ceased, during the interrogation process, to expose their breasts, sexually touch prisoners or exhibit pornographic material.

What would happen if good American Christians took time to discuss our use of torture during their Sunday school classes?

How has this administration handled the Red Cross’s findings on prisoner torture? They simply ignored the report, stating, according to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s office, that this is simply the Red Cross’s “point of view” not shared by Bush.

Contempt for rules for civilized behavior can best be illustrated by the appointment of Alberto Gonzales to the cabinet post of Attorney General. Gonzales, while serving as the White House chief counsel, was responsible for formulating the policy for treating prisoners, successfully de-toothing the Geneva Convention to provide us with the right to engage in torturing prisoners to achieve our goals.

Can any other action better demonstrate how we as a nation are losing our soul, turning our back on the gospel mandate, and becoming like those whom we call enemies? How can we be the city on the hill when our actions “to the least of these” contradicts any allegiance to the God we call the Prince of Peace?...

...Jesus tells us what to do with a tree that bears bad fruit. And yet, some Christians support torture and injustices in the name of patriotism. They choose the easy road, and want this wide gate of power and privilege protected on the homefront as well as the world stage.

But we also know this wide gate leads to destruction. They will stand before the throne saying “Lord, Lord, did I not define my “moral values’ in you name?” But alas, for on that day, the prisoners of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo shall arise and bear witness against this perverse generation....

posted by Me | 11:56 AM

Save us from the politicians who have God on their side
A week in the United States, such as I have just spent, is enough to make anybody feel a trifle fed up with God, or rather with the relentless invocation of the deity by American politicians, led by their president. No public occasion would be complete without the blessing of the Almighty being besought for whatever endeavour tops the agenda, most prominently the war in Iraq. The appeal to faith, seldom mere ritual, is usually founded upon conviction.

There is an attractive rationalist case for insisting that candidates for election anywhere in the world are required to sign a declaration forswearing religious affiliation. Had this been done in Ireland a couple of generations ago, think what we would have been spared.

Few modern political careers are compatible with religious principle. Government by atheists would relieve us of the irksome moral conceit that impels George Bush and Tony Blair to do deplorable things while remaining convinced that slots are kept open for them in heaven.

Even among the enemies of democracy, at the extreme end of the scale it is easier to deal with the IRA, whose ambitions are political, than Osama bin Laden, with whom there can be no negotiation, only global submission to Islam.

I am not in the least anti-religious. If pressed I would describe myself as a social Anglican. Yet I find myself increasingly eager to be governed by politicians who profess no pretensions to a hot line to a higher power....

posted by Me | 10:14 AM

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Is Bush the Antichrist?
..."Bush is one of the key figures leading the church away from Jesus," says Christian author Don Miller, who wrote the nonbluenose Christian best seller Blue Like Jazz. Miller is no pantywaist—he had the balls to run a ministry at Reed College in Portland, Ore., which is so godless that its soccer team is said in campus legend to have once staged a halftime crucifixion in a game against a Christian school. But he couldn't stomach it when, for instance, Texas Gov. Bush not only allowed the execution of his fellow born-again Christian, the penitent ax murderer Karla Faye Tucker, but made vicious fun of her ("Please don't kill me!" Bush said, mocking her prayerful plea for God's mercy). Miller classifies Bush Christians as modern Pharisees—the allegedly proud, rigid, legalistic hypocrites John the Baptist called "a generation of vipers." "The worst condemnation that Jesus has for anybody, I mean the worst, is for Pharisees," says Miller. "If you asked Jerry Falwell who the Pharisees are in our society, they can't point anybody out." There are no mirrors in Bush's church....

...But few have preached harder against the Christian right's wrongs than the Rev. Rich Lang of Seattle's Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard. "This administration is a culture of death, and so is the religious right," says Lang. In his Open Letter to George Bush, published in Real Change, Lang thunders, "You claim Christ but act like Caesar. There is blood all over your hands with the promise of even more blood to come. You sit atop the nations like the Biblical Whore of Babylon openly fornicating with the military men of might." His sermon "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism" (posted like Luther's theses on the church Web site, www.tumseattle.org) rails that "the power and seduction of this administration emerges from its diabolical manipulation of Christian rhetoric . . . the mirror opposite of what Jesus embodied. It is, indeed, the materialization of the spirit of Antichrist: a perversion of Christian faith and practice."

Lang is not using "Antichrist" in a tone of bitter sarcasm, as many do. Google "George Bush is the Antichrist," and you'll get a startling list of Web sites that argue the case, but with sardonic intent and whimsical 666-numerological riffs. Unwhimsical pundit Robert Wright, who attended Calvary Baptist in Bush's Midland, Texas, hometown, uses modern science to puzzle out what may be God's plan in his bold book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. When he notes in Slate magazine that he supported John Kerry because "He's a long way from being the Messiah, but at least he's not the anti-Christ," Wright says not to take this as gospel. "Obviously, I was kidding—Bush isn't literally the Antichrist. But I do think he could conceivably do some pretty cataclysmic damage to the world. . . ." Even Christian Bush-basher Miller urgently distances himself from the Bush-as- Antichrist meme that's sweeping the Web: "The last thing I want is for someone to say, 'Don Miller thinks Bush is the Antichrist!'"

"He's not the Antichrist, he's just a cynical, callous politician," objects Stealing Jesus author Bawer. "I gather some liberal Christians have gone off the rails." He refers to Lang's identification of Bush with the "spirit of Antichrist" warned against in the Bible's 1 John 4:3. "This kind of inane proof texting is the province of the Church of Law types, the right-wing Darbyites," believers in Left Behind–style apocalyptic prophecy. "It's depressing to see it practiced by liberal Christians, too." Bawer is appalled by Bush's attempt, "in the name of Christianity, to add to the Constitution what would be far and away its most un-Christian amendment. But I'm also unsettled by the extreme way in which he's been personally characterized by many people."

Granted, Bawer says the right "worships evil," and has "warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism [and] denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology." But "when people start calling somebody the Antichrist, we're in right-wing fundamentalist, Church of Law territory, and I don't like it one bit. . . . Demonizing (literally) individuals in this way is ugly, scary. . . . "

Lang, though, stands his ground against his famous accuser, and insists that he's missing some crucial distinctions. "This is not about George Bush, this is about this whole administration. It's about Karl Rove, it's about the neocons, some of whom are Christian, some who aren't, but who are using Christian rhetoric. James Dobson [of Focus on the Family] has direct access to the highest echelons of American government. And Robertson and Falwell."

Still, Lang means what he says about Bush. "He has the spirit of the Antichrist. Literally, break the word apart. It is a spirituality that is anti-Christ."

So what's an Antichrist, anyhow? The concept has evolved bewilderingly throughout biblical history ...

...Lang argues that followers of Jesus, not Bush, should call an Antichrist an Antichrist—or rather, its spirit. "The progressive church should bring back—and this sounds so crazy—the word 'heresy.' The end times theology and this other thing called Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction—those are heresies." Lang says not to believe Christian Coalition leader–turned–Whore of Enron–turned Bush/Cheney campaign lieutenant Ralph Reed when he claims the Christian right has no plans to upend the Constitution and impose its religion on civic life. "He's a liar," says Lang. "Dominionism is the notion that God has given the dominion, the governance of the world, to the church. And so Christians literally are born to rule, by force if necessary, to bring the Kingdom of God on Earth. I believe that the theology that drives the Bush administration affirms this." When Falwell preached, "We must take back what is rightfully ours," his ambitions did not stop at U.S. borders. This is a Church of a Law Unto Itself.

In the Greek, the word "anti" doesn't just mean "against." It also contains the meanings "equivalent to" or "a substitute for." Nero was anti-Christ because he falsely claimed to be God. The idea of deception is crucial. The Antichrist isn't the devil, the opposite of God. He's an evil human masquerading as a golden god. The Antichrist appears to humanity not as the hideous Beast but as handsome Nicolae Carpathia, who resembles Robert Redford without the facial erosion. "That could be our next Republican president," quips Lang.

In this sense, the Bush church is Antichristlike indeed. It is institutionalized deception, anti-American ugliness with a beguiling face, a neocon job. Only when necessary does it employ the perilous bald-faced lie, the outrageously transparent duplicity—the political equivalent of Robertson arguing that "Do unto others" indicates Christ's support of capitalist selfishness. More often, a smoothly dissembling surface is preferred. Rove notoriously emulates Machiavelli; the Christian right is a stealth movement, infiltrating school boards and mainstream churches and every institution of democracy like a thief in the night—in order to undermine, overthrow, and replace democracy with theocracy. Bush is the father of lies. The Union of Concerned Scientists proclaims Bush's lies about science "unprecedented." In With God on Their Side, Kaplan concludes, on mountainous evidence, "The goal is not to engage your opponents in the public square, but to kneecap them, or send them into exile."...

posted by Me | 10:47 PM

GRAPHIC: Falluja Pictures

posted by Me | 10:08 AM

Friday, December 10, 2004

Disease risk stops Falluja return
...Sewage and rabid animals pose a significant health threat in Falluja, US military officials have warned....

..."Many streets are flooded with sewage water," Red Cross spokesman Ahmad Rawi, who has just returned from Falluja, told the BBC News website.

He said the city's water treatment plant has to itself be drained before an assessment can be made of how badly it has been damaged.

Another priority for the agency, Mr Rawi said, is the identification of "hundreds of bodies" collected and stored by US-led forces in a former potato warehouse...

...The Red Cross could not confirm whether the warehouse had refrigeration facilities to prevent the bodies from decaying....

Marines hunt down Fallujah's strays to head off rabies threat
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AFP) - US troops fire off another volley of shots amid the trashed houses of Fallujah, hunting down new adversaries carrying a potentially deadly weapon that threatens to plague reconstruction efforts.

But this time the marines are not chasing down the insurgents who they defeated in a devastating assault on the city last month. Their quarry is stray animals grown fat on the flesh from corpses and who could harbor rabies....

...But there was none of the bloodlust that many marines say they felt last month as they stormed the Sunni-Muslim enclave and wrested it away from insurgents during several days of vicious fighting.

A gunnery sergeant stalked past the convoy, tersely ordering his executioners to put on surgical gloves before handling the dead animals, his mouth pulled into the tight grimace of a man trying to finish the job before him as quickly as possible.

"This is hard on these guys, especially killing the dogs. But these animals have been eating dead bodies. They can spread disease," said Lieutenant Aaron Brown, grimly reciting the toll for the day -- several cats and at least one dog. ...

posted by Me | 6:06 PM

Evidently the team of Pentagon lawyers which crafted the document explaining how the president could avoid war crimes prosecution for himself and his subordinates even while authorizing widespread torture was led by a woman, U.S. Air Force General Counsel Mary L. Walker. She’s also a devout evangelical Christian - she co-founded a San Diego group called Professional Women's Fellowship, an offshoot of Campus Crusade for Christ...

posted by Me | 4:57 PM

Where Does FOX Get These Military Analysts?
I spent a frightening 45 minutes listening to FOX military analyst Retired General Paul Vallely on FOX News Live with Alan Colmes last night. It was bad enough when he stated flatly that "we are not going to permit" a Shia majority to win the upcoming election in Iraq. He saw no hypocrisy in the US determining who should win an election in a country that we claim to have liberated and democratized.

But then he advocated forming a coalition with Israel in a holy war against Iran and Syria.

The subject arose when Alan Colmes mentioned the worrisome news that Colin Powell says Iran is working on nuclear missiles and nuclear missile delivery systems.

"Iran and Syria are next," Vallely decreed. "It's easy to do.... Israel is (already) prepared to take Iran down." ...

...Colmes questioned the wisdom of a Judeo/Christian holy war against Muslims. "That's what's going on," Vallely said. "If you don't understand that, then you don't get it."...

posted by Me | 4:48 PM

Defeat For an Empire
by Robert Jensen

12/09/04 "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" -- The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.

I don't mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.

The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven't protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this "new American century."

So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple reason: It isn't the defeat of the United States -- its people or their ideals -- but of that empire. And it's essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled. ...

... We should all carry a profound sense of sadness at where decisions made by U.S. policy-makers -- not just the gang in power today but a string of Republican and Democratic administrations -- have left us and the Iraqis. But that sadness should not keep us from pursuing the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: pledging to dismantle the American empire. ...

posted by Me | 3:17 PM

Student Claims Dismissal from FCA Prompted by Vote for Kerry
A student at Carson-Newman College says he was removed from leadership in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes after telling a chapter president he was voting for John Kerry.

That contradicts official reports from FCA leaders, who say the matter has been resolved and had nothing to do with politics.

Asked last month to respond to rumors about the flap, Joshua Sonoga, an east Tennessee regional FCA staff member who volunteers as a kicking coach for the Carson-Newman football team, told EthicsDaily.com the dispute was not over politics but rather theological issues that he declined to disclose.

That prompted the student in question, who had not answered previous e-mails on the topic, to write a lengthy response labeling Sonoga’s explanation “an absurd lie.”

John Dalton told EthicsDaily.com that he confronted chapter co-president Matt Sexton privately because he felt FCA meetings were too political. Dalton said he knew from comments made at the meetings that Sexton was supporting President Bush, and the other co-president, Brady Tarr, had passed out Bush pins at the front door of FCA meetings.

After he informed Sexton of his political views and his plans to vote for Kerry, Dalton said his friend sought to change his mind, criticizing not only Kerry’s views on abortion and homosexuality but other issues including his healthcare plan.

Two days later, Sexton called and asked for another meeting, where he told Dalton he had prayed about it and reached a conclusion that Dalton’s “spiritual discernment” was incorrect because of the way he was going to vote.

Dalton said Sexton quoted evangelicals who said a person could not vote for John Kerry and be right with God and told him there were two options in the election for a Christian: “to vote for Bush or not to vote at all.”...

posted by Me | 1:21 PM

'Scarborough Country' for Dec. 8
PAT BUCHANAN, GUEST HOST: Could Academy Award judges really choose Michael Moore‘s “Fahrenheit 9/11” over Mel Gibson‘s biblical masterpiece, “The Passion of the Christ”? We‘ll soon find out. And if they do, will there be a red state revolt against Hollywood? ...

...RABBI SHMULEY BOTEACH, AUTHOR, “FACE YOUR FEAR”: Well, firstly, let me just say that I hope that Michael Moore actually wins so we can finally confirm what Hollywood is. Hollywood has become an America-hating bastion that always portrays people in uniform in some sinister role. It‘s always the CIA killing President Kennedy.

And so when I see Michael Moore‘s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and he portrays our soldiers as a bunch of cutthroats who play Metallica while killing Iraqi civilians, let‘s confirm what Hollywood is by giving him this Oscar.

But I‘ve got to tell you, Pat, the fact that Christians around the country be offended if Mel Gibson‘s “The Passion” doesn‘t win best Oscar is shocking to me. First of all, “The Passion of the Christ” was an domination for Christianity. It really should win the World Wrestling Federation Oscar for best movie. It‘s a guy for two hours being kicked, beaten, his blood gushing everywhere. It‘s just a diabolical, criminal, violent mess.

(CROSSTALK)

BOTEACH: It really is like Mohammed al-Zarqawi‘s movies on the Internet where a guy gets his head chopped off. It‘s gory. It‘s ugly and it‘s not inspiring.

BUCHANAN: Well, since about tens of millions of Americans saw it, loved it, appreciated it, and honored it, that tells us, Rabbi, I think, what you think of the intelligence and sensitivity of millions of Americans.

Bill Donahue, what do you think about “The Passion of the Christ”? And as a practical matter, even if Hollywood hated the film, it seems to me as an artistic work of art, a smashing triumph, a film of great controversy and interest, it ought to at least be nominated for best picture. It pulled in more money than any other picture all year.

WILLIAM DONAHUE, PRESIDENT, CATHOLIC LEAGUE: I spoke to Mel a couple of weeks ago about this. And I don‘t think it really matters a whole lot to him. It certainly doesn‘t matter to me. We‘ve already won.

Who really cares what Hollywood thinks? All these hacks come out there. Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It‘s not a secret, OK? And I‘m not afraid to say it. That‘s why they hate this movie. It‘s about Jesus Christ, and it‘s about truth. It‘s about the messiah.

Hollywood likes anal sex. They like to see the public square without nativity scenes. I like families. I like children. They like abortions. I believe in traditional values and restraint. They believe in libertinism. We have nothing in common. But you know what? The culture war has been ongoing for a long time. Their side has lost.

You have got secular Jews. You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group, and these people are in the margins. Frankly, Michael Moore represents a cult movie. Mel Gibson represents the mainstream of America. ...

...BOTEACH: Pat, the reason why many Jews—I‘m not among them—are fearful of Christianity is, they‘re tired of Christians saying that we‘re a bunch of Christ killers. They‘re tired of the lie that we killed Jesus. ...

...BUCHANAN: Did not the Jewish establishment want this man who said he was the messiah, who said he was the son of God, who said he was coming to bring a new religion, did they not want him out of the way?

BOTEACH: Of course not.

They saved his life in Luke Chapter 13, Verse 31.

(CROSSTALK)

BOTEACH: Hold in. And they saved the apostle‘s life in Acts Chapter 5, in Acts 23.

(CROSSTALK)

BOTEACH: I know the New Testament.

DONAHUE: It was the Puerto Ricans that did it.

(CROSSTALK)

BOTEACH: Every time I quote the New Testament, you guys respond with ignorance. I know the New Testament backwards to forwards.

(CROSSTALK)

BOTEACH: The fact is, the New Testament says that the rabbis and pharisees saved Jesus‘ life over and over again. The fact that Bill Donahue is ignorant of the New Testament is not my fault. ...

...BOTEACH: What bothers me, Jennifer, is that you‘re an ignorant peasant who doesn‘t even know Christian text, for God‘s sake.

What the New Testament said is that the high priest, who was a Sadducee, who was an agent of Rome, who worked directly for Pontius Pilate, had a problem with Jesus and reported him to Pilate and had him killed. ...

posted by Me | 1:04 PM

Bullying prompts suicide attempt
An eighth-grade Peak to Peak Charter School student tried to kill herself as a way to escape severe religious harassment by classmates, the girl’s mother said last week.

The incident comes on the heels of threatened legal action by a former Peak to Peak mother, Louise Benson, who said her son — who is no longer at the school — suffered intense religious bullying by fundamentalist Christian students.

Other families reportedly have claimed their children have been harassed in the halls of Peak to Peak for religious, sexual orientation and other reasons.

Benson’s lawyer, Michelle Mintzer Murphy, said that within the past week, several families contacted her about such harassment.

Evie Hudak, a member of the Colorado Board of Education, said she has received complaints of religious harassment from three Peak to Peak families in the past year.

Those families say school administrators have done little to confront what they contend is an ongoing problem.

Recently, one father said his eighth-grade daughter endured physical abuse that goes back at least two years.

Students who are part of a small group known as the “fundies” — fundamentalist Christians — call her a lesbian, he said....

... The mother of the girl who attempted suicide said her daughter will recover from her injuries. However, for now she requires 24-hour supervision.

She said her daughter was singled out for harassment because she is tall and openly rejected creationism. The girl endured shoulder checks, tripping in the hall and other physical abuse, the mother said. Some students called her ugly and said she was a lesbian, she added....

...“Non-Christian children are viciously bullied for their different beliefs, and the perpetrators are not disciplined at all,” Benson said....

posted by Me | 10:22 AM

Tenet calls for Internet security
Former CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday called for new security measures to guard against attacks on the United States that use the Internet, which he called "a potential Achilles' heel."

"I know that these actions will be controversial in this age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no control or accountability," he told an information-technology security conference in Washington, "but ultimately the Wild West must give way to governance and control."

The former CIA director said telecommunications -- and specifically the Internet -- are a back door through which terrorists and other enemies of the United States could attack the country, even though great strides have been made in securing the physical infrastructure....

Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, he said. ...

posted by Me | 10:12 AM

The Plot Against Sex in America
...In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News.) But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey" - an art-house picture that, however well reviewed or Oscar-nominated, will be seen by a relatively small audience, mostly in blue states. The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis. (Though that success, too, is in doubt: The Washington Post reports that this year some 40 states are dealing with challenges to the teaching of evolution in public schools.)

"Kinsey" is an almost uncannily helpful guide to how these old cultural fault lines have re-emerged from their tomb, virtually unchanged. Among Kinsey's on-screen antagonists is a university hygiene instructor who states with absolute certitude that abstinence is the only cure needed to stop syphilis. Sound familiar? In tune with the "moral values" crusaders, the Web site for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has obscured and downplayed the important information that condoms are overwhelmingly effective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases. (A nonprofit organization supporting comprehensive sex education, Advocates for Youth, publicized this subterfuge and has been rewarded with three government audits of its finances in eight months.) Elsewhere in "Kinsey," we watch desperate students pepper their professor with a series of uninformed questions: "Can too much sex cause cancer? Does suppressing sex lead to stuttering? Does too much masturbation cause premature ejaculation?" Though that sequence takes place in 1939, you can turn on CNN in December 2004 and watch Genevieve Wood of the Family Research Council repeatedly refuse - five times, according to the transcript - to disown the idea that masturbation can cause pregnancy.

Ms. Wood was being asked about that on "Crossfire" because a new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that our government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive. A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those that don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California, a huge blue state that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, that has a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska. ...

posted by Me | 8:56 AM

The Lord has just blessed [George W. Bush]. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him.
-- Pat Robertson, 700 Club, March 2004

posted by Me | 7:25 AM

Rebellion in the Ranks
It was a Maalox moment for Donald Rumsfeld. At a forum held with U.S. troops in Kuwait who are headed to Iraq, the barrage of friendly fire soon scored a direct hit when a scout with the Tennessee National Guard, one Specialist Thomas Willson rose, and, his voice confident and clear but with an undertone of bafflement, asked:

"We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"...

...Neither Specialist Wilson nor any of the soldiers suing to end the "stop-loss" programs that effectively conscript them for the duration are explicitly questioning the wisdom or justice of the war – but their complaints all stem from the tactics employed by the War Party to get us into the Iraqi quagmire in the first place. Wilson's question about the lack of armor relates directly to this, because, in the rush to war, there was no time to amass the kind of equipment and personnel necessary to deal with the aftermath of our inevitable "victory."

The War Party had to get those troops in there quickly, before the rationale for war was exposed as a series of outright lies. It was only a matter of time, after all, before the "secret" of Saddam's empty arsenal got out, and UN inspectors got in. The neocons' prewar mythology – Saddam's nonexistent links to Al Qaeda, his phantom nukes, his drones that threatened to rain death down on American cities – had a short shelf life, and the idea was to sell it at any price. Their whole edifice of lies was being undermined by war critics in both parties, and most especially in the government itself. There was no time to properly armor the convoys that would take our troops into battle – only time to wish them Godspeed, and good luck....

posted by Me | 7:06 AM

Fort Carson halts access for The Post
The base is refusing to give the paper information because of a Sunday front-page article on military medical holds.

Fort Carson -The Army is denying The Denver Post access to Fort Carson and to information on military activities in the wake of a Sunday article in The Post on military medical holds.

"We have temporarily suspended relations with The Denver Post as a direct result of Fort Carson not being given fair and balanced treatment in a story that appeared on Dec. 5, 2004," Lt. Col. David Johnson, the chief public affairs officer at the base, said Wednesday evening.

The front-page article examined claims from mentally and physically ill National Guard and Army Reserve members who say they are being denied access to quality care and are being shoved out of the military without disability pay. Congress has been scrutinizing medical holds at bases across the country....

...Also last week, The Denver Post obtained an injunction to stop an investigative hearing that had been closed to the public for three Fort Carson soldiers charged with murdering an Iraqi general.

posted by Me | 6:56 AM

90% survive war wounds
Wounded American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have a 90 percent survival rate -- the highest of any war in U.S. history -- despite suffering torn-off limbs, extensive burns and bodies shredded by shrapnel.

Ten percent of the injured are dying, compared with 30 percent in World War II and 24 percent in Vietnam, according to an article published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

But the scars of survival can be devastating.

"These are injuries that were uniformly fatal in previous wars -- such as losing three limbs," said Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Harvard Medical School who wrote the article after extensive research and interviews with people serving in Iraq.

"No one used to survive when they were this badly injured."

Two men who did are B.J. Jackson, who lost both legs when his Humvee was ambushed in Baghdad, and Army Cpl. J.R. Martinez, who lost 40 percent of the skin on his body in Karbala....

posted by Me | 6:54 AM

Amputation rate for US troops twice that of past wars
Doctors cite need for prosthetics as more lives saved

US troops injured in Iraq have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars, and as many as 20 percent have suffered head and neck injuries that may require a lifetime of care, according to new data giving the clearest picture yet of the severity of battlefield wounds.

The data are the grisly flip side of improvements in battlefield medicine that have saved many combatants who would have died in the past: Only 1 in 10 US troops injured in Iraq has died, the lowest rate of any war in US history.

But those who survive have much more grievous wounds. Bulletproof Kevlar vests protect soldiers' bodies but not their limbs, as insurgent snipers and makeshift bombs tear off arms and legs and rip into faces and necks. More than half of those injured sustain wounds so serious they cannot return to duty, according to Pentagon statistics....

...In addition to amputations, many soldiers making this journey have head and neck injuries, frequently injured by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, essentially remote-controlled bombs planted in the ground.

"The angle of the force of these IEDs is right for the neck and face. That's been devastating to folks over there," said Holt, explaining that Kevlar helmets do not protect the underside of heads and necks, where crucial nerves and blood vessels lie.

Lieutenant Colonel Michael S. Xydakis, a military surgeon, released a little-noticed study in September at a medical conference of head and neck surgeons. He found that over a 14-month period, about 1 in 5 US soldiers treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, which handles most Iraq casualties, had head or neck injuries.

These injuries, surgeons said, have long-term implications, with many involving irreversible brain damage, breathing and eating impairments, blindness, or severe disfiguration. The study prompted the military to add a full-time head and neck surgeon to a Baghdad field hospital.

"These folks are just starting to come back, and they may require care for a long, long time," said Holt.

posted by Me | 6:48 AM

Thursday, December 09, 2004

School defends slavery booklet
Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures."

Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a booklet that attempts to provide a biblical justification for slavery and asserts that slaves weren't treated as badly as people think....

...Here are some excerpts from the booklet:

* "To say the least, it is strange that the thing the Bible condemns (slave-trading) brings very little opprobrium upon the North, yet that which the Bible allows (slave-ownership) has brought down all manner of condemnation upon the South." (page 22)

* "As we have already mentioned, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery was not perfect or sinless, but the reality was a far cry from the horrific descriptions given to us in modern histories." (page 22)

* "Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." (page 24)

* "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." (page 24)

* "Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." (page 25)

* "But many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends." (page 27)

* "Nearly every slave in the South enjoyed a higher standard of living than the poor whites of the South -- and had a much easier existence." (page 30)

posted by Me | 6:18 PM

An enemy of the state
George Galloway

When the 17th-century republican Algernon Sidney spoke on Tower Hill before his beheading on false charges almost exactly 321 years ago, he observed that "the whole matter is reduced to the papers said to have been found in my closet by the King's officers". In the days after Baghdad fell to US forces last April, all manner of closets spilled forth papers - remarkably often to the Telegraph group of newspapers. In quick succession, their reporters claimed to have found, in a series of burning buildings, documents linking Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden, tales of French and Russian perfidy, and the papers they used to smear me as being in the pay of the Iraqi regime.

Like the paperwork on which the case for the war itself was built, these all turned out to be bunkum, bogus or doctored. A Daily Telegraph reporter, Philip Smucker, came up with his own documents for the US Christian Science Monitor, making similar claims. The Mail on Sunday purchased still more documentation, putting my supposed "earnings" from Saddam and his family into a £20m-plus stratosphere. Both were shown to be forgeries. One by one these assaults by the pro-war media foundered on a large and immovable rock - none of them was true.

Eighteen months and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths further on, the Daily Telegraph has been given a judicial thrashing at the high court, which will have stung more powerfully than any its public schoolboy editors endured in their younger days. Well over seven figures of damages and costs, combined with Mr Justice Eady's damning judgment, must have made the paper's new owners smart at the damage done to the Telegraph's reputation by the old regime of Lord Conrad Black, Barbara Amiel and fox-hunter Charles Moore.

Over several days and dozens of articles, the Telegraph tried comprehensively to discredit me and the wider anti-war movement. As Neil Darbyshire, the paper's executive editor, said to explain why the paper rushed into print: "The Iraq war was at a volatile stage and Mr Galloway was unceasing in his opposition". And when they couldn't stand their story up they sought refuge in the coward's defence that they had never suggested the lurid claims they published had been true - but merely "neutral reportage" in the public interest. Even a blind man in a hurry could see that, in the words of Mr Justice Eady, "the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described".

But as most British people now believe, the entire case for the war was based on falsehoods and lies. From the forged papers showing Iraq buying nuclear materials from Niger to the pulp fiction of the Campbell-Scarlett dossiers, one of the grossest deceptions in modern history has been practised upon us. ...

posted by Me | 3:24 PM

'We have to protect people'
President Bush wants 'pro-homosexual' drama banned. Gary Taylor meets the politician in charge of making it happen

What should we do with US classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Color Purple? "Dig a hole," Gerald Allen recommends, "and dump them in it." Don't laugh. Gerald Allen's book-burying opinions are not a joke.

Earlier this week, Allen got a call from Washington. He will be meeting with President Bush on Monday. I asked him if this was his first invitation to the White House. "Oh no," he laughs. "It's my fifth meeting with Mr Bush."

Bush is interested in Allen's opinions because Allen is an elected Republican representative in the Alabama state legislature. He is Bush's base. Last week, Bush's base introduced a bill that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that "promote homosexuality". Allen does not want taxpayers' money to support "positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle". That's why Tennessee Williams and Alice Walker have got to go.

I ask Allen what prompted this bill. Was one of his children exposed to something in school that he considered inappropriate? Did he see some flamingly gay book displayed prominently at the public library?

No, nothing like that. "It was election day," he explains. Last month, "14 states passed referendums defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman". Exit polls asked people what they considered the most important issue, and "moral values in this country" were "the top of the list".

"Traditional family values are under attack," Allen informs me. They've been under attack "for the last 40 years". The enemy, this time, is not al-Qaida. The axis of evil is "Hollywood, the music industry". We have an obligation to "save society from moral destruction". We have to prevent liberal libarians and trendy teachers from "re-engineering society's fabric in the minds of our children". We have to "protect Alabamians"....

posted by Me | 3:02 PM

The War in Iraq
How Catholic conservatives got it wrong

H. Richard Niebuhr once wrote that the first question of ethics is not “What should I do?” but “What is going on?” The Baghdad version of that principle might be, “What the hell is going on?” It is a question that comes to me when I wake up to a car bomb or fall asleep to the sound of mortar fire. I was asking it when a Kurdish colleague took me to see the memorial at Halabja, where Saddam gassed five thousand villagers. I asked it again last March when 223 Shi’a pilgrims died in Karbala. And again when, in the late afternoon of August 1, there were two loud thuds and the hotel shook and I saw the plumes of smoke rising over the buildings north of my balcony, buildings occupied by people I work with. I was asking it the next morning when I discovered that two more car bombs had exploded next to a Christian seminary, killing ten, leaving professors and students shaking and looking in vain for loved ones, and burnt car parts spotting the lawn.

Perhaps my confusion and fear were something like what Tolstoy’s Count Bezukhov was feeling in War and Peace when he surveyed the carnage at the battlefield of Borodino. I don’t know. Maybe it is more like the terror felt by a nine-year-old Iraqi friend who for weeks spent the nights crouched by her window, waiting for the U.S. soldiers to come again, heavy metal blasting from their Humvees, blowing up doors to drag her brothers from their beds and take them off to Abu Ghraib. ...

...Until the October 2004 issue, the last time Neuhaus addressed Iraq was August-September 2003. Even after American soldiers had stood by as Baghdad was looted, he wrote:

Leading up to the invasion and even after its rapid military success, critics were predicting a quagmire, a Somalia-like debacle, a rising of the Arab “street” that would be “a storm from hell,” and, of course, another Vietnam. With reference to civilian casualties, some protesters spoke about a “Middle East holocaust.” None of that happened. In view of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam’s murderous regime, the war probably saved innumerable lives. So the critics were abysmally wrong on almost every point. That must be clearly established on the public record.

I will point to several such statements by Neuhaus and Weigel. The point is not to play “gotcha.” I remain an admirer of their work. Yet it is precisely as a theologian and a reader-and more broadly as a citizen-that I want answers to questions raised by the arguments Weigel and Neuhaus made in support of the preemptive war in Iraq. Those arguments were made in the public square that First Things, especially in light of last month’s presidential election, has done so much to open up to religious language. What I am most concerned with can be reduced to four points. First, Neuhaus and Weigel, like the administration they support, failed in the summer of 2003 to see that the war was far from over. Second, their faith in the competency of the Bush administration, and their contempt for religious leaders who disagreed with them, can now more easily be recognized for what it was: an attachment to a particular brand of neoconservatism overwhelming their attachment to the just-war tradition. Third, their scant attention to how the war was actually conducted (jus in bello), and their disdain for those who pushed questions about noncombatant deaths and proportionality, suggest the need for a reappraisal of the value they placed on the just causes (ad bellum) of the war. Finally, I would argue that their silence since the fall of Baghdad is more disturbing than their mistakes before and during “major combat operations.” The issue is not only, or not simply, that they were wrong. Perhaps they think they were right. The issue, especially in light of President George W. Bush’s re-election, is their current “moral muteness in a time of war.” ...

...For religious leaders to raise questions about civilian casualties and Muslim reaction was, according to Neuhaus, “badgering.” Concerned religious leaders were taking up the politicians’ valuable time. It was as if the only thing for religious leaders to do was to get out of the way and let the responsible parties do their thing. Even Neuhaus and Weigel weren’t really needed. They were simply agents of the ground clearing, trying to minimize the influence of those whiny pacifists so that Bush and the neocons could have a clear and unobstructed path to war. What is striking here is Neuhaus’s apparent faith in the “competent parties,” the same faith proclaimed by Weigel when he wrote of the politicians’ “charism of responsibility.” But sentiment-“I trust my government to try really hard”-is not any kind of argument. “Nobody knows what will happen” is not an alternative to so-called nervous handwringing. Cheerleading is not an alternative to badgering.

The possible consequences of war had in fact been considered day and night for many months. (See, for example, James Fallows, “Blind into Baghdad,” the Atlantic Monthly, January-February 2004.) The competent parties were the Army and the State Department. Their conclusions were rejected, their committees silenced. Of course, we know now not only that the Pentagon ignored the conclusions of the Army (which was preparing for conditions predicted by those naive hand-wringing ecclesiastics), but that the whole invasion and occupation were based on a set of dubious claims, if not outright lies, about weapons of mass destruction and the link to Al Qaeda.

So, what was functioning-like a badly manufactured pair of eyeglasses-for these two Catholic theologians who take rightful pride in their otherwise often clear-eyed view of things? Can there be any doubt that what blurred their perception was their faith in the current administration? Weigel and Neuhaus are right to remind us that there are many things religious leaders don’t know that the government does know. But the lack of resources among those outside of government is, finally, obvious. What is not at all obvious is why this disparity in access to information is a reason for trust instead of skepticism, or even mistrust, toward even democratic governments. If the events and revelations of the last sixteen months have not been enough to tilt the balance toward mistrust, there are also good old-fashioned theological reasons to side with skepticism, and not just toward this administration or other Republican administrations. Still, I remain curious why Weigel and Neuhaus are so oblivious to some other good reasons why conservatives should question what their government says. Since when are conservatives not suspicious of government? Since when is a deep mistrust of state bureaucracies not a defining characteristic of conservatism? ...

...What about Abu Ghraib? There was little that was contingent, in Weigel’s sense, about the abuses that happened there. Those abuses were the predictable result of massive random arrests, denial of fair trials, poorly trained guards, and power shrouded in secrecy. The laws and mechanisms of inspection instituted by the Geneva Conventions are not primarily meant to detect abuses after they have happened. They are meant to foster an environment of transparency and accountability that discourages abuse. They are meant to make impossible the sort of Newspeak spouted by the lawyers of the Justice and Defense departments explaining why Bush’s “inherent constitutional authority” over war made the obligations of the UN’s Torture Convention “inapplicable.” The policies of the officials in charge of military prisons from Guantánamo to Baghdad-random arrests, denial of fair trial, secrecy-are jus in bello issues about which we should have a great deal of clarity. Shouldn’t Christian theologians have great clarity about the injustice of such methods? Contrary to Weigel, that clarity must come before questions concerning the just conduct of war. Or, at the least, the debate about the rules governing the treatment of prisoners suggests that there can be no clear line between the questions of just cause and just conduct. Weigel calls the question of “competent authority” an ad bellum criterion. But one of the lessons of the war in Iraq is that the Bush administration was and is an incompetent authority because of its disregard for the customary rules governing the conduct of war. The refusal to appoint an independent inquiry into prisoner abuse is further proof of this administration’s disregard for just-war teaching....

posted by Me | 1:48 PM

Armor Holdings Could Boost Humvee Armor Output 22%
Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Armor Holdings Inc., the sole supplier of protective plates for the Humvee military vehicles used in Iraq, said it could increase output by as much as 22 percent per month with no investment and is awaiting an order from the Army.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday the Army was working as fast as it can and supply is dictated by ``a matter of physics, not a matter of money.''

Jacksonville, Florida-based Armor Holdings last month told the Army it could add armor to as many as 550 of the trucks a month, up from 450 vehicles now, Robert Mecredy, president of the company's aerospace and defense group said in a telephone interview today.

``We're prepared to build 50 to 100 vehicles more per month,'' Mecredy said in the interview. ``I've told the customer that and I stand ready to do that.''

Insurgent attacks on the vehicles with homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades are accounting for as much as half of the more than 1,000 U.S. deaths and 9,000 U.S. wounded in Iraq, according to Congressional estimates. ...

posted by Me | 1:36 PM

Officer Alleges CIA Retaliation
Lawsuit Says Agency Urged False Reporting on Iraqi Arms

A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused.

The operative, who remains under cover, asserts in a lawsuit made public yesterday that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma." ...

posted by Me | 1:33 PM

Rumsfeld vs. the American Soldier
What Rummy's survival says about Bush's plans for his second term.

Donald Rumsfeld gave every grunt in the Army a good reason to hate him today.

At a cavernous hangar in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, the secretary of defense appeared before 2,300 soldiers to boost their morale before they headed off to Iraq. During a question-and-answer period, Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a unit that consists mainly of reservists from the Tennessee Army National Guard, spoke up to complain about their inadequate supply of armor.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Wilson asked, setting off what the Associated Press described as "a big cheer" from his comrades in arms.

Rumsfeld paused, asked Wilson to repeat the question, then finally replied, "You go to war with the army you have." Besides, he added, "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can be blown up."

Such a leader of men.

Rumsfeld's answer was, first, unforgivably glib, reminiscent of his shrugged line about the looting in the days after Saddam's fall ("Stuff happens"), but more shocking because here he was addressing American soldiers who are still fighting and dying, 20 months after Baghdad's fall, as a result of Rumsfeld's decisions.

More than that, his answer was wrong. If you're attacked by surprise, you go to war with the army you have. But if you've planned the war a year in advance and you initiate the attack, you have the opportunity—and obligation—to equip your soldiers with what they'll need. Yes, some soldiers will get killed no matter the precautions, but the idea is to heighten their odds—or at least not diminish them—as they're thrust into battle.

So here stands the secretary of defense, long and widely despised by officers for rejecting their advice before the war and now openly criticized by the grunts for failing to give them proper cover as the war rages on all around them.

And yet Rumsfeld is the one Cabinet secretary who has received explicit assurances that he will keep his job, with President Bush's full confidence, into the second term. ...

posted by Me | 1:31 PM

Army Teams Face Surgeon Shortage
A severe shortage of surgeons in Iraq has left U.S. Army medical teams scrambling to handle the largest number of casualties since the Vietnam War, the New England Journal of Medicine reports.

WASHINGTON — A severe shortage of surgeons in Iraq has left U.S. Army medical teams in the country scrambling to handle the largest number of casualties since the Vietnam War, the New England Journal of Medicine will report Thursday....

...The system focuses on damage control, not definitive repair, Gawande writes. Field doctors carry "mini-hospitals" in Humvees and field operating kits in backpacks so they can move with troops and do surgery on the spot.

They limit surgery to two hours or less, often leaving temporary closures and even plastic bags over wounds, and send soldiers to one of several combat support hospitals in Iraq with services like labs and X-rays.

The strategy seems to be working. Although at least as many U.S. troops have been wounded in combat in the Iraq war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 or the first five years of Vietnam, 90% are surviving their injuries, compared to 76% in Vietnam. In that war, almost all of the wounded who died did so before they could reach MASH units-military surgery facilities — some distance from the fighting.

But the survivors today often have injuries so severe and maiming that their prospects are uncertain, Gawande writes.

Gawande writes about the case of an airman who lost both legs, his right hand and part of his face.

"How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question," Gawande writes.

posted by Me | 1:27 PM

Homeless Iraq vets showing up at shelters
Washington, DC, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era.

"When we already have people from Iraq on the streets, my God," said Linda Boone, executive director of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. "I have talked to enough (shelters) to know we are getting them. It is happening and this nation is not prepared for that."...

... "This is what happened with the Vietnam vets. I went to Vietnam," said John Keaveney, chief operating officer of New Directions, a shelter and drug-and-alcohol treatment program for veterans in Los Angeles. That city has an estimated 27,000 homeless veterans, the largest such population in the nation. "It is like watching history being repeated," Keaveney said.

Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that as of last July, nearly 28,000 veterans from Iraq sought health care from the VA. One out of every five was diagnosed with a mental disorder, according to the VA. An Army study in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 17 percent of service members returning from Iraq met screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety disorder or PTSD....

posted by Me | 1:24 PM

From Donuts To Heroin
...Banzhaf cites "growing evidence...that eating some fattening foods can cause addictive reactions in the brain just like nicotine," evidence he says is sufficient "to warrant at least a warning about possible addictive effects." He advises food companies that such warnings would help shield them from liability – very sporting of him, since he is a leading advocate of suing them for making people fat.

Banzhaf's latest evidence is an article in the December Psychology Today that likens overeating to drug addiction. "Like addicts," it says, "overeaters may be compensating for a sluggish dopamine system by turning to the one thing that gets their neurons pumping... It's a mark of changing times – and more sophisticated science – that the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse is thinking about doughnuts as well as heroin."

Perceiving a threat to personal responsibility, conservatives tend to reject such comparisons as outlandish exaggerations. Surely donuts – a familiar product that most of us consume in moderation, if at all – are nothing like heroin, which everyone knows is the most addictive drug around. (Except for crack. And methamphetamine. And nicotine.)

But such scoffing reflects a misunderstanding of drug addiction, which is neither inevitable nor inescapable. The government's own statistics indicate that the vast majority of people who use drugs – even such reputedly powerful substances as heroin and crack – never become addicts. Those who do often manage to stop or moderate their use. There are about as many former smokers in this country as smokers, for example, and they typically quit without formal "treatment."...

...At a recent hearing convened by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Judith Reisman of the California Protective Parents Association testified that "pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the 'high' from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erotoxins."

In Reisman's telling, the conscious mind plays no role in people's reactions to pornography. She called the effects of sexually explicit material "brain sabotage," warning that "pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process."

This is the sort of choice-negating reductionism, leaving no room for tastes, values, or learning, that conservatives usually reject when it comes to, say, fast food ads. All experiences "imprint and alter the brain." That fact tells us nothing about how people respond to those experiences – whether with disgust or enthusiasm, moderation or excess.

Reisman and other critics of pornography say it's dehumanizing, reducing people to genitals. The same could be said of a behavioral theory that looks at people and sees only biochemicals.

posted by Me | 1:12 PM

The Military Channel
...As the Fourth Estate continues to morph into what General/Journalist Tommy Franks calls the "Fourth Front" in the ongoing and endless war on terror, and as the lines blur ever-further between military public affairs – disseminating accurate information to the media and the public – and psychological and information operations – using often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle – the inevitable has finally happened.

The Military Channel.

How did it happen?

As the Hollywood Reporter aptly put it, "Discovery Wings Channel has been drafted."

That's right – Discovery Communications International (DCI), a media behemoth that boasts 60 networks representing 19 entertainment brands (including TLC, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, Discovery Health Channel, Discovery Kids, and, in partnership with the New York Times, the Discovery Times Channel) will "re-launch" its six-year-old Discovery Wings cabler next month as the Military Channel, focusing on all aspects of the armed forces, military strategies and personnel throughout the ages.

"By covering all aspects of the military and the people who define it, we will extend the Discovery brand, create a service that appeals to our existing viewers and attract new viewers and sponsors," said Billy Campbell, president of Discovery Networks US, who called military-related issues "a topic of fascination and relevance in our world."

In case you were unaware, the fairly obscure Discovery Wings, launched in July 1998, focused on aviation and related subjects. Now Discovery is partnering with the likes of the USO, the National D-Day Museum, the Military.com Web site, and the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation to develop programming for the channel, along with educational campaigns and public service announcements.

Soon you too will be able to "go behind the lines" and undertake a "new mission" as Discovery offers what its press materials dub "a Broad Focus on All Aspects of the Military With a Wide Array of Programming About its People, Strategy, Technology and History."

What kind of programming? The kind that will bring you "compelling, real-world stories of heroism, military strategy, technological breakthroughs and turning points in history."

But wait – there's more: "The Military Channel also provides access to military personnel and hardware, allowing viewers to experience and understand a world full of human drama, courage, innovation and long-held traditions." ...

posted by Me | 9:08 AM

Custom-printed Bibles for U.S. Special Ops on the way
Although the International Bible Society (IBS) indeed will crank out a limited-run, special edition of the New International Version Bible in the near future, it's unlikely that readers will discover, for example, a previously unreleased surprise ending to the Good Book. Rather, according to FedBizOpps.com, a site for federal government procurement opportunities, the Department of Defense intends to award the IBS a sole-source contract for the production of 10,000 Bibles containing military-specific messages and imagery. The Bibles - which will be distributed to soldiers of the elite U.S. Special Operations Command - will feature a "custom-designed cover" and "Army designed color photographs and text inserts."...

posted by Me | 9:02 AM

Watchdog Group Calls Column Racist
NEW YORK Sam Francis displayed "clear bigotry" in a column about Monday Night Football's controversial Nicollette Sheridan/Terrell Owens spot, said a media watchdog group in a letter sent yesterday to Creators Syndicate.

"Did I disagree with the column? Yes," responded Anthony Zurcher, a Creators editor who saw the Francis piece before it was syndicated. "Did I feel it was so reprehensible that it shouldn't have been sent out? No."

In his Nov. 26 column, Francis decried the MNF spot not only for its implied nudity and implied sex, but for racial reasons. (Sheridan is white and Owens is black.) Francis wrote, among other things: "Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself."...

posted by Me | 7:32 AM

I’m an Unrealistic Peace-Loving Utopian Idealist
Every time I write a column on the war issue I get a bunch of emails from people telling me that I’m ignorant to the "real world" and that I’m caught up in hopeless "utopian idealism." This was also the case the other day when I demonstrated from Scripture and church tradition that war should only be an absolute last resort under very strict conditions. I further proved from Scripture that Christians ought to be striving for peace and to reflect Christ-like lives, not pounding the drums for war. Some Christians, however, did not like this crazy talk at all and accused me of a litany of errors in my reasoning, most notably that I was being an unrealistic utopian.

There are some problems with these accusations. Nowhere in these critical messages did any of these fellow Christians try and dispute my exegetical analysis. They just asserted that I didn’t know what I was talking about and then they would usually launch into some tirade about how I hated America, freedom, the Jewish people, etc., etc. Others would go on about the need for sacrifice and the "realities" of the 21st century. Apparently the only reality they can fathom is a very pessimistic one where the ethics and ideals of Christ are incapable of rising above the values and ethics of this world.

Why do they have such a hard time with Christian teachings against violence? They claim that in the "real world" violence and war are always going to be around and that force will always be necessary in different situations....

... To my war-happy Christian critics who accuse me of being a utopian idealist, how would you like it if your pastor condoned fornication because Biblical teachings on purity are "unrealistic" (which is what basically all non-Christians would say)? You’d probably go nuts. You’d accuse the pastor of not fully trusting God and lessening his standards on Biblical truth. You’d be right. So if it’s wrong to doubt God and dilute truth on sexual matters, why is it OK to do so with teachings regarding peace, revenge, love, etc.?...

posted by Me | 7:06 AM

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Answer the Question
White House press briefing, 12/06/04. Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, takes Bush's religion seriously. Too bad Bush's spokesman, Scott McClellan, doesn't.

Mokhiber: Scott, on the Middle East -- many evangelical Christians in the United States are supporting right-wing Jews in Israel who want to rebuild the temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They (Evangelical Christians) believe this is a prerequisite for Christ's return to earth. They believe that when Christ returns to earth -- they call this the rapture -- he will take back with him the true believers. And the rest -- the non-believers -- Jews, Muslims -- will be left behind to face a violent death here on earth. My question is, as a born again Christian, does the President support efforts to rebuild the temple on the Temple Mount?

Scott McLellan: Russ, we can sit here and talk about religious issues. I will be glad to take your question, and if there is more, I will get back to you on that.

Mokhiber: Is he a born again Christian?

Scott McLellan: Thank you. (McLellan abruptly ends the press briefing and walks out.)

posted by Me | 1:01 PM

Are These the New Dark Ages?
The period between the 400s and the late 900s A.D. was termed The Dark Ages by scholars who later lamented that during that epoch almost all love for learning, art and craftsmanship disappeared in Western Europe.

During the Middle Ages a vibrant cultural commitment to discovery and progress was replaced by the preference for popular myths, fabrications and rumors, which were used by both the religious and political leaders to regulate the aspirations and fears of the masses. It is often forgotten, however, that during this dark period in Western Christianity’s history the Muslims developed a splendidly progressive civilization that stretched from Spain to China.

Behind the frenetic agenda of the political and religious right in America today lies a profound angst over the unspoken awareness that American civilization is most likely entering a profound period of economic, religious and cultural descendency. They know that our ability to claim pre-eminence in these areas certainly will soon be openly questioned by the world. Even our military pre-eminence cannot for much longer rescue us from our fading sense of supremacy.

This fear--that America is facing a significant period of economic, religious and cultural decline--is actually the essential root cause of the social anxiety which is behind much of the political and religious right’s recent achievements.

Evangelical fundamentalists are on a ruthless crusade to “save America” from what they perceive is its potential destruction from within.

They identify liberalism as the culprit, but they are sorely mistaken. The real danger for the world is religious fundamentalism. The most frightening aspect of this crusade is comfort level of fundamentalists with regards to an apocalyptic resolution of this conflict if their agenda of cultural redemption cannot be achieved.

The irony is that the world’s fundamentalists of every tradition have this in common, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim. They are distraught over the perceived losses and declines of their particular culture, and they are willing to use all means available to purge their culture of all people working for the cause of enlightenment and rationality....

posted by Me | 9:52 AM

Faith-Based Communicators React to CBS, NBC Nixing of Church Ad
December 3, 2004, NEW YORK CITY - Responding to the refusal of the CBS and NBC television networks to air a message from the United Church of Christ, a nationwide group of faith-based communicators has issued a statement challenging the networks' action as "arbitrary" and contrary to the principles of freedom of speech and equal access to media.

The statement was drafted yesterday by the Communication Commission of the National Council of Churches USA, an ecumenical association of professional communicators serving a wide range of Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox faith groups. The statement reads:

"The controversial issue here is not the content of the ad, but the arbitrary standards of the network gatekeepers. Church doors are open to all who would come; but broadcast channels are increasingly closed to all but the wealthy and well-connected.

"It is important to note that the broadcast networks are not being asked to give free time to the United Church of Christ to express its message - the church is ready to pay dearly for that privilege, even though the networks do not pay for their highly profitable use of the broadcast spectrum.

"The Federal Communications Commission, in giving free access to the public's airwaves to commercial corporations - with virtually no strings attached - has handed them powerful control over America's media "public square." The for-profit keepers of that square are all too willing to promulgate messages laced with sexual innuendo, greed, violence, and the politics of personal destruction, but a message of openness and welcome that merely says "church doors are open to all" is being silenced as too controversial!

"Advocacy advertising abounds on TV: agribusinesses, drug manufacturers, gambling casinos, oil companies, even some government agencies regularly expose viewers to messages advocating their products and programs, in the interest of shaping public attitudes and building support for their points of view.

"Are only the ideas and attitudes of faith groups now off limits? Constitutional guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of speech, not to mention common fairness, beg for leadership by the FCC to assure that America's faith community has full and equal access to the nation's airwaves, to deliver positive messages that seek to build and enrich the quality of life."...

posted by Me | 9:48 AM

Army Torture Whistleblower Kidnapped and Flown out of Iraq
...On June 15, 2002, Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard's 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military medical center outside the country....

...Col. C. Tsai, a military doctor who examined Ford in Germany and found nothing wrong with him, told a film crew for Spiegel Television that he was "not surprised" at Ford's diagnosis. Tsai told Spiegel that he had treated "three or four" other U.S. soldiers from Iraq that were also sent to Landstuhl for psychological evaluations or "combat stress counseling" after they reported incidents of detainee abuse or other wrongdoing by American soldiers....

posted by Me | 8:35 AM

Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss
Why don't we Americans look directly at the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone. Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.

Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months, overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was never addressed.

Astoundingly, the Democrats cooperated with the Republicans in assuring that the war in Iraq -- the one thing that might have defeated Bush -- was not an issue. That marginalization of the anti-war impulse continues in the suspended animation of a period after the American election and before the Iraqi election.

The new Bush administration has moved to reconfigure itself in most ways but one. The president's affirmation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in combination with his naming of Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, reflects a blind determination to "stay the course" in Iraq, never mind that the course is heading off a cliff....

...Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have just been through an election in which "religious values" were defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the discussion. America's purpose in Iraq is a compound of such deflection, self-deception, half-measures, and shallow thinking. The opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back.

posted by Me | 7:19 AM

Leading evangelicals lend their support to the President in the effort to go to war with Iraq
(or here)

Dear Mr. President,

In this decisive hour of our nation’s history we are writing to express our deep appreciation for your bold, courageous, and visionary leadership. Americans everywhere have been inspired by your eloquent and clear articulation of our nation’s highest ideals of freedom and of our resolve to defend that freedom both here and across the globe.

We believe that your policies concerning the ongoing international terrorist campaign against America are both right and just. Specifically, we believe that your stated policies concerning Saddam Hussein and his headlong pursuit and development of biochemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction are prudent and fall well within the time-honored criteria of just war theory as developed by Christian theologians in the late fourth and early fifth centuries A.D....

posted by Me | 5:53 AM

Pro-War Christians Should Come Clean
Leading up to the war in Iraq, evangelical Christians became perhaps the most enthusiastic advocates of imperium. Though politicians have often abused "Just War theory," it is still an integral part of Christian ethics when examining issues of war and peace. Thus, one must ask, was the Iraq war "just" based on the criteria of historic Just War theory?

Lets look at a sampling of comments proffered by Evangelical leaders leading up to the war.

Henry Blackaby told Agape Press, "those who oppose the war to liberate Iraq need to read God's Word." Blackaby said, "There is no question that the current war to liberate Iraq is a 'just' war – according to biblical standards." Blackaby went on to say that those who stand in opposition to the president were courting the very judgment of God.

Writing in defense of preemptive military strikes in Christianity Today, Chuck Colson argued for a less restrictive understanding of Just War theory in the face of the terrorist threat. Remarkably, Colson writes that, "out of love of neighbor, then, Christians can and should support a preemptive strike" when an attack is imminent. Try not to snicker, but Colson also wrote the following:

"Of course, all of this presupposes solid intelligence and the goodwill of U.S. and Western leaders. I find it hard to believe that any president, aware of the awesome consequences of his decision and of the swiftness of second-guessing in a liberal democracy, would act recklessly."

Now then, I love Colson, but given that he believes in the total depravity of man and considering that he did time in the pokey for doing Nixon's dirty work, wouldn't you think he might be a bit more circumspect about executive branch power, and the abuse thereof? ...

... In a sermon at his Atlanta church, Charles Stanley defended the "war on terror." Stanley said that, "Throughout Scripture there is evidence that God favors war for divine reasons and sometimes uses it to accomplish His will. He has also given governments and their citizens very specific responsibilities in regards to this matter."

Naturally, Stanley did not try to justify this particular war and again directed his listeners to Romans 13 and demanded they be good boys and girls. He asks, "How can we justify the protests and marches against war? I understand that, in America, for example, we have a right to express our different opinions. However, there comes a time when our personal opinion is not a priority. The only reason we have the freedom to protest in this country is because thousands were willing to die for that liberty in the past." Rather than relying on Scripture, Stanley resorts to vulgar patriotism here. ...

posted by Me | 5:44 AM

The Free Speech Myth
...Now that government is so massive, and interferes in virtually every aspect of our lives, being a journalist means acquiring a large portion of the information that is used in daily news reporting from the government. If you are a foreign affairs correspondent, then most of your daily information comes from the State Department. If you are an environmental reporter you rely crucially on information from EPA bureaucrats. Farm state reporters depend on the U.S. Department of Agriculture bureaucracy. If you report on state and local politics, the governor’s office is one of your main sources of information.

This is why there is no longer an independent press – or genuine freedom of speech – in America. Any reporter who reports truthfully about the scandals, illegal acts, and downright failures of government will be shut off from his information sources and his career ruined. Those who become mere lapdogs to the powers that be will thrive. Just look at the success of the Fox News Channel, whose logo should be "All GOP Propaganda, All the Time." ...

posted by Me | 5:41 AM

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

More GOP Slime
Republican Congressman, Donald "Buz" Lukens, convicted of having sex with a minor. http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/from_redirect/0,10987,1101890213-151183

Republican fundraiser, Richard A. Delgaudio, convicted of child porn charges.
http://www.thewbalchannel.com/news/2153721/detail.html

Republican activist, Mark A. Grethen, convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.
http://www.orlandoweekly.com/weird/index.asp?now=3400

Republican activist, Randal David Ankeney, convicted of assaulting a 14-year-old girl.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/1130885/detail.html

Republican Congressman, Dan Crane, had sex with a minor.
http://archive.salon.com/col/cona/1998/10/05cona.html

Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader, Beverly Russell, admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter. http://wlo.org/nw/nww5.html

Republican anti-abortion activist, John Allen Burt, was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15 year old girl. http://www.brojed.org/wwwboard/messages/14076.html

Conservative radio talk host indicted on charge of indecency with child
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/111203_local_matthews.html

Republican congressman, Robert Bauman, was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy. http://www.glinn.com/news/h122989a.htm

Republican activist, Marty Glickman convicted on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a juvenile and one count of the delivery of LSD. http://www.democraticunderground.com/top10/01/top10_2001_15.html

Howard L. Brooks, a Republican staffer, charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.

http://www.sacbee.com/static/live/news/calreport/N2001-11-22-2300-0.html

Republican Senate candidate, John Hathaway, was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter.
http://www..cascobayweekly.com/cbw/news/al01.31.02.stm

Republican preacher, Stephen White, arrested after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him. http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=23709

Republican state Rep. Brent Parker arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover officer posing as a male prostitute. http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Mar/03012003/utah/34193.asp

Douglas County Election Commissioner Pat McPherson arrested for fondling a 17-year-old girl. http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_np=0&u_pg=36

Jim Bakker - adultery
Jimmy Swaggart - adultery
Bob Dole - adultery
Ann Coulter - "Let's say I go out every night, I meet a guy have sex with him. Good for me. I'm not married." Rivera Live
Helen Chenoweth (R - Idaho) - serial adultery
Sue Myrick (R- N.C.) - adultery
Henry Hyde - adultery
Bob Barr - adultery
Dan Burton - adultery
Bob Livingstone - adultery
Bob Packwood - sexual harassment
Steve Symms - (R- Idaho) - serial adultery
Newt Gingrich - adultery
Beverly Russell - (S. Carolina) - child molestation
Jim Bunn - (R - Oregon) - adultery
Jim Nussle - (R - Iowa) - adultery
Joe Scarborough - (R- Florida) - adultery
John McLaughlin - sexual harassment
Tim Hutchinson (R - Arkansas) - adultery
Rudy Giuliani -adultery
George Roche III - adultery with his son's wife
Earl Kimmerling - child molestation
Mike Trout - adultery
Mike Bowers - adultery
Richard Delgaudio - (he brought us Paula Jones) - child pornography
Ken Calvert - arrested for engaging with a prostitute
Matt Glavin - homosexual indecent exposure
Deal Hudson - sexual harassment of a female student
Edward L. Schrock (R-Va.) - married but solicited sex from male homosexual
Philip Giordano - sexual child abuse
Randal David Ankeney - attempted sexual assault on a child
Robert Bauman - homosexual sex with a minor
John Hathaway - sex with a minor
Stephen White - soliciting a 14 year old boy
Jon Matthews - indecency with a child
Earl "Butch" Kimmerling - child molestation
Paul Ingram - incest
Andrew Buhr - sodomy with a 12 year old boy
Keith Westmoreland - indecency with minors
John Allen Burt - molesting a minor
Parker J. Bena - child pornography
Larry Jack Schwarz - child pornography
Robin Vanderwall - soliciting sex with minors of both sexes
Marty Glickman - unlawful sexual activity with a minor
Dan Crane - sex with a minor (a Congressional page)
Donald "Buz" Lukens - sex with a minor
First Lady Laura Bush - Manslaughter
Vice President Dick Cheney - Draft dodger
Entertainer Rush Limbaugh - Drug abuse
Entertainer Bill O'Reilly - Sexual harassment
Outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft - Draft dodger
CA Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger - Serial groping, sexual harassment, drug abuse
Former South Dakota Gov Bill Janklow - Manslaughter
Former Drug Czar Bill Bennett - Gambling addiction
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - Draft dodger
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey - Draft dodger
House Majority Leader Tom Delay - Draft dodger
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist - Cruelty to animals
Rep. David Dreier - Closeted gay who supports anti-gay policies
Rep. Mark Foley - Closeted gay who supports anti-gay policies
Prospective RNC Head Ken Mehlman - Closeted gay who supports anti-gay policies
TV evangelist Paul Crouch - Closeted gay who supports anti-gay policies, accused of bilking flock

posted by Me | 2:48 PM

"God Is With Us": Hitler's Rhetoric and the Lure of "Moral Values"
A couple weeks ago, while asserting that the Founding Founders intended for the U.S. government to be infused with Christianity, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said that the Holocaust was able to flourish in Germany because of Europe's secular ways. "Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America?" Scalia asked a congregation at Manhattan's Shearith Israel synagogue. "I don't think so."

One might expect regular citizens to be ignorant of history, but a Supreme Court Justice? Does he imagine that the phrase "Gott mit Uns" was a German clothier's interpretation of "Got Milk"?...

...Scalia, who also cited the Bible to claim that government "derives its moral authority from God," is hardly alone in his assertions. Leo Strauss, the philosopher who has influenced neoconservativism, and by proxy, George Bush's America, felt that religion, like deception, was crucial to maintaining social order. Meanwhile, neoconservative kingpin Irving Kristol has argued similar points -- bragging about how easy it is to fool the public into accepting the government's actions while arguing that America's Founding Fathers were wrong to insist on the separation of church and state. Why? According to Jim Lobe, it's because religion, as Strauss and his disciples see it, is "absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control."

Saying that neoconservatives believe that secular society is undesirable "because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats," Lobe explained why Kristol and other neocons have "allied themselves with the Christian Right" and, in some cases, have also denounced Darwin's theory of evolution. "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers," Reason magazine's Ronald Bailey explained, pointing to publications like Commentary which has espoused the virtues of religious fundamentalism and has questioned evolutionary science. ...

...Although several others, including the legendary Seymour Hersh, have noted the neoconservatives' belief that deception is essential, the religious aspect of their philosophy is especially unnerving. Religion may be the opium of the masses, but when zealots become so certain of their own righteousness that they ignore their own humanity, horror is the natural consequence. Islamic extremism offers the most glaring recent example, and now that Osama bin Laden has been granted permission to nuke America, the most extreme changes within the U.S. could very well come from the outside world....

...Yes, many of Hitler's faith-based comments could have come from George Bush himself, and are undoubtedly the kinds of sentiments many Americans not only agree with -- but take comfort in. This is not to say that Bush is Hitler or that religion is evil, but to serve as a reminder that things are not always what they seem. Christianity was used to justify everything from the Salem witch trials to slavery in America, and facilitated group-think in Germany -- when individuality and questions of conscience were needed the most. These are but a few of the Fuhrer's assertions...

posted by Me | 1:59 PM

Hitler Was Not An Atheist
...Hitler's Germany amalgamated state with church. Soldiers of the vermacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: "Gott mit uns" (God is with us). His troops were often sprinkled with holy water by the priests. It was a real Christian country whose citizens were indoctrinated by both state and church and blindly followed all authority figures, political and ecclesiastical.

Hitler, like some of the today's politicians and preachers, politicized "family values." He liked corporeal punishment in home and school. Jesus prayers became mandatory in all schools under his administration. While abortion was illegal in pre-Hitler Germany, he took it to new depths of enforcement, requiring all doctors to report to the government the circumstances of all miscarriages. He openly despised homosexuality and criminalized it. If past is prologue, we know what to expect if liberty becomes license. ...

posted by Me | 1:58 PM

Pastor Charged With Sexual Exploitation Of Child
First Assembly Of God Church Fires Reverend

KCCI learned that the married father of four recently turned himself in to Johnston police.

Rev. Mike Hintz was fired from the First Assembly of God Church, located at 2725 Merle Hay Road, on Oct. 30. Hintz was the youth pastor there for three years....

Bush signs Tax Relief Act
President Bush visited the swing state of Iowa on Monday to sign the Working Families Tax Relief Act of 2004, which he said would mean lower tax bills for 94 million Americans.

"It comes at just the right time for America. Some of the provisions were set to expire at the end of 2004 ..." he said. "That would have been a setback for hardworking families of America and a setback for our economy."

Bush introduced Mike and Sharla Hintz, a couple from Clive, whom he said benefited from his tax plan.

Last year, because of the enhanced the child tax credit, they received an extra $1,600 in their tax refund, Bush said. With other tax cuts in the bill, they saved $2,800 on their income taxes.

They used the money to buy a wood-burning stove to more efficiently heat their home, made some home improvements and went on a vacation to Minnesota, the president said.

"Next year, maybe they'll want to come to Texas," Bush quipped.

Mike Hintz, a First Assembly of God youth pastor, said the tax cuts also gave him additional money to use for health care.

He said he supports Bush's values....

posted by Me | 11:24 AM

Apocalypse Now
...A TIME/CNN poll finds that more than one-third of Americans say they are paying more attention now to how the news might relate to the end of the world, and have talked about what the Bible has to say on the subject. Fully 59% say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack....

...Rick Scarborough, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Pearland, Texas, a Houston suburb, resigned his pulpit this month to put all his energy into recruiting Christians to become politically involved. "I am mobilizing Christians and getting more Christians to vote. I am preparing a beachhead of righteousness," he says. Meanwhile Wyoming state senator Carroll Miller, a popular legislator from Big Horn County, announced his retirement from politics in part so that he could spend more time speaking at churches and men's clubs, helping people come to grips with the prospect of the Second Coming. "It's very important that we as a Christian nation know what the Scriptures have said about these days," he says. "I'm putting forth my personal effort for my own sake as well as for my family and friends."...

...But it took something more, a pre-eminent theological entrepreneur, to bring a wider American audience to the apocalyptic tradition. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, became the best-selling nonfiction book of its decade; Time called Lindsey "the Jeremiah of our generation" for his detailed argument that the end was approaching. "That's the first book I ever read about last days, and it changed my life," says George Morrison, pastor of Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colo., where average Sunday-morning attendance is 4,000. "All of a sudden, I was made aware that wow, there's an order to this thing." Lindsey's explanation of the Bible's warnings came just as a backlash was stirring against '60s liberalism, an echo of the 18th century reaction to the Enlightenment. Lindsey caught the moment that launched a decade of evangelical resurgence, when for the first time in generations believers organized to put their stamp on this world, rather than the next.

The election of Ronald Reagan brought "Christian Zionism" deeper into the White House: Lindsey served as a consultant on Middle East affairs to the Pentagon and the Israeli government. Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostalist, in discussing environmental concerns, observed, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger affirmed, "I have read the Book of Revelation, and, yes, I believe the world is going to end—by an act of God, I hope—but every day I think time is running out." It was no accident that Reagan made his "evil empire" speech at a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals. ...

...It is one thing to become politically active to deploy that Gospel to improve people's lives, another to try to promote a specific religious scenario. Intercessors for America, a 30-year-old prayer ministry, helps keep people politically connected through e-mail alerts and telephone-prayer chains. The June 11 Prayer Alert implored, "Lord, raise up government leaders in Israel, the United States (and worldwide) who will not seek to 'divide the land,' and who would recognize the unique significance of Jerusalem in God's end-time purposes." A refusal to consider Israel's withdrawal from any occupied territory would tend to complicate the peace process: virtually every proposal has involved a land-for-peace swap. Yet at the same time, "if this wave of terrorism continues without a meaningful peace treaty soon," predicts John Hagee, pastor of the 17,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, "the sparks of war will produce a third world war. And that will be the coming of the End Times. That will be the end of the world as we know it."...

posted by Me | 9:06 AM

The Fundamentalist Agenda
is absolutely natural, ancient, and powerful—but the liberal impulse makes us humane

...From 1988 to 1993, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences sponsored an interdisciplinary study known as The Fundamentalism Project, the largest such study ever done. More than 100 scholars from all over the world took part, reporting on every imaginable kind of fundamentalism. And what they discovered was that the agenda of all fundamentalist movements in the world is virtually identical, regardless of religion or culture.

They identified five characteristics shared by virtually all fundamentalisms. The fundamentalists' agenda starts with insistence that their rules must be made to apply to all people, and to all areas of life. There can be no separation of church and state, or of public and private areas of life. The rigid rules of God—and they never doubt that they and only they have got these right—must become the law of the land. Pat Robertson, again, has said that just as Supreme Court justices place a hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution, so they should also place a hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. In Khomeini's Iran, and in the recent Taliban rule of Afghanistan, we saw how brutal and bloody this looks in real time.

The second agenda item is really at the top of the list, and it's vulgarly simple: Men are on top. Men are bigger and stronger, and they rule not only through physical strength but also and more importantly through their influence on the laws and rules of the land. Men set the boundaries. Men define the norms, and men enforce them. They also define women, and they define them through narrowly conceived biological functions. Women are to be supportive wives, mothers, and homemakers.

A third item follows from the others. (Indeed each part of the fundamentalist agenda is necessarily interlocked, and needs every other part to survive.) Since there is only one right picture of the world, one right set of beliefs, and one right set of roles for men, women, and children, it is imperative that this picture and these rules be communicated precisely to the next generation. Therefore, fundamentalists must control education by controlling textbooks and teaching styles, deciding what may and may not be taught.

Fourth, fundamentalists spurn the modern, and want to return to a nostalgic vision of a golden age that never really existed. Several of the scholars observed a strong and deep resemblance between fundamentalism and fascism. Both have almost identical agendas. Men are on top, women are subservient, there is one rigid set of rules, with police and military might to enforce them, and education is tightly controlled by the state. One scholar suggested that it's helpful to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. The phrase “overcoming the modern” is a fascist slogan dating back to at least 1941.

The fifth point is the most abstract, though it's foundational. Fundamentalists deny history in a radical and idiosyncratic way. Fundamentalists know as well or better than anybody that culture shapes everything it touches: The times we live in color how we think, what we value, and the kind of people we become. Fundamentalists agree on the perverseness of modern American society: the air of permissiveness and narcissism, individual rights unbalanced by responsibilities, sex divorced from commitment, and so on. What they don't want to see is the way culture colored the era when their scriptures were created.

Good biblical scholarship begins by studying the cultural situation when scriptures were written in search of their original intent, so that we can better discern what messages they may still have that are relevant for our lives. But if fundamentalists were to admit that their own scriptures are as culturally conditioned as everything else, they would lose the foundation of their certainties. Some scholars see evidence that St. Paul, for instance, had severe personal hang-ups about sex that may account for his harsh teachings about homosexuality and women. Many biblical scholars treat some of Paul's teachings as rants rather than revelations. But for fundamentalists, their scriptures fell straight from heaven in a leather-bound book, every jot and tittle intact.

Except for the illustrations I've added in laying out the agenda that the Fundamentalism Project discovered, you can't tell what religion, culture, or century I'm describing. The scholars discovered this a dozen years ago while they were presenting abstracts of their papers. Several noted that all their papers were sounding alike, reporting on “species” when studying the “genus” was called for, that there were strong family resemblances between all fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.

The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors are familiar because we've all seen them so many times. These men are acting the role of “alpha males” who define the boundaries of their group's territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children; there is a clear separation between the in-group and the out-group. The in-group is protected; outsiders are expelled or fought.

It is easier to account for this set of behavioral biases as part of the common evolutionary heritage of our species than to argue that it is simply a monumental coincidence that the social and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms and fascisms are essentially identical.

What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been. It is the picture of life that gave birth to most of the gods as its projected champions.

Fundamentalism is absolutely natural, ancient, powerful—and inadequate. It's a means of structuring relationships that evolved when we lived in troops of 150 or less. But in the modern world, it's completely incapable of the nuance or flexibility needed to structure humane societies. ...

posted by Me | 8:58 AM

Gadflyers Prove Prescient
We learn via MyDD, riffing off of something Tom Schaller pointed out and I have been seconding for weeks, that it's a very good thing that the likes of James Dobson and Jerry Falwell are taking credit for Bush's victory. A recent CBS/New York Times poll finds that in answer to the question, "What worries you more: public officials who don't pay enough attention to religion and religious leaders, or public officials who are too close to religion and religious leaders?", only 35% said they were worried by politicians who didn't pay enough attention to religion, while 51% said they were worried by politicians who were too close to religion. A year ago, these numbers were reversed, with 50% saying they were worried politicians didn't pay enough attention and 34% saying they were worried they paid too much attention. Although we can't say for sure, I agree with Chris Bowers that most of this movement probably happened since the election....

posted by Me | 7:44 AM

Monday, December 06, 2004

The rapture debunked
..."Today's Christian fixation on Armageddon and war is a sickness even while it may be thrilling and entertaining," Rossing said by phone, a few days after she preached on the theme of the Second Coming for the first Sunday in Advent.

Rossing, who has a doctorate from the Harvard Divinity School, says she wrote her latest book, "The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation," which came out earlier this year, because "more and more I was talking to Lutherans and evangelicals and even Catholics who had read the [Left Behind] novels and gotten the impression this was what the Bible teaches." In news stories on the Left Behind juggernaut, she has been quoted condemning the ethical implications of the "beam-me-up" aspect of Rapture theory, which she says "invites a selfish nonconcern for the world." But the heart of the book is Rossing's effort to go toe-to-toe with the Rapture theorists in Scriptural readings.

The Rapture theory itself is quite new, she argues -- one reason to be suspicious. It was largely invented around 1830 by a British evangelical named John Nelson Darby. One key proof-text, then as now, is Daniel 9:24-27, which speaks of "seventy weeks of years" between the time "the word went out to restore and build Jerusalem" and the second coming. Theologians disagree on when the clock should start for the countdown of those 490 years (70 times seven). After the 69th week, however, Daniel says a "prince" will come who "shall destroy the city and its sanctuary" through war and flood.

Rossing and other mainline biblical scholars believe this last is a historical reference to an emperor named Antiochus, who desecrated Jerusalem's main temple in 168 BC by erecting a statue of Zeus. However, the Rapture theorists say this can't be what Daniel refers to, citing a lack of the all-out "desolation" described in Daniel. Instead, they say, the 490-year countdown continued into Jesus' time and stopped when he was crucified. Therefore, the Earth still awaits one more week of years, or seven years, of the prophecy: first, the destruction of the Temple (which at this point must be rebuilt, on the site where the Dome of the Rock now stands) and then seven years of war and flood.

Rossing calls the purported 2,000-year clock stoppage -- unmentioned in Daniel -- a "complete fabrication." Additionally, she says, the Rapture theorists strain to impose a two-part Second Coming on the New Testament. The gospel of Matthew says, "Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left." But Rossing says those lines don't even make it clear which person is being saved, let alone specify a seven-year gap between the two events.

The Book of Revelation, with its hail and fire and plagues and blood, provides the grist for much of the Left Behind books' depiction of the Tribulation. But Rossing calls Revelation an allegorical vision of a possible future -- "a wakeup call" for first-century Christians. (She says it's not unlike the frightening vision of the future that Marley's ghost shows Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol" -- another future that didn't have to happen.) And despite blood and gore, the centerpiece of Revelation, she says, is still the "Lamb" of God, who "conquers" only through love.

To Christians wondering which Biblical reading to believe, Rossing says: "I would just appeal to their experience of God in their lives. Is he a God who wants to destroy the world or who wants to redeem it and who gives us a vision of hope?" Tensions between secular elites and heartland believers have been getting a lot of ink lately. But Rossing's book shows that intellectual battles within Christianity can be just as heated -- and, given that they can shape Christian responses to, say, Middle Eastern wars -- just as consequential.

posted by Me | 5:21 PM

Firebombing Falluja
The United States is using napalm in Falluja. So far, the military has denied the allegations, but the proof is mounting. On Nov. 28 The Daily Mirror’s political editor, Paul Gilfeather filed a report stating: “US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah. News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.”

For over a week rumors have circulated in the Arab press that both napalm and other chemical weapons were used mainly in the Jolan district of Falluja, a major area of the fighting. Now, despite a US media blackout, more evidence is leaking out and causing a furor in the British Parliament. As Gilfeather reports: “Last night Tony Blair was dragged into the row as furious Labour MPs demanded he face the Commons over it. Reports claim that innocent civilians have died in napalm attacks, which turn victims into human fireballs as the gel bonds flames to flesh.”

Blair is being pressed by furious MP’s to clarify whether or not he knew that the “banned weapon” was being used. He is also being asked to withdraw British troops if the US continues its use of napalm. As of this writing, Blair’s response remains unknown.

The US has already admitted that it used napalm during the siege of Baghdad. The truth was reluctantly confirmed by the Pentagon after news reports corroborated the evidence. The military has tried to conceal the truth by saying that there is a distinction between its new weapon and “traditional napalm”. The “improved” product carries the Pentagon moniker “Mark 77 firebombs” and uses jet fuel to “decrease environmental damage”. The fact that military planner’s even considered “environmental damage” while developing the tools for incinerating human beings, gives us some insight into the deep vein of cynicism that permeates their ranks.

The Pentagon’s hair-splitting has done little to obfuscate the facts. Marines returning from Iraq call the bombs napalm and napalm it is. Journalist Simon Jenkins of the British Sunday Times describes the incidents in Falluja like this: “Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.” It is an excruciatingly painful way to die.

Independent journalists have been reporting for some time now that the US has been using banned weapons in Falluja. Iraqi doctors have noted that many of the bodies they have examined have been “swollen, yellowish and have no smell.” Asia Times online has reported that “Americans used chemical weapons in the bombing of Jolan, ash-Shuhada and al-Jubayl neighborhoods. They also say the neighborhoods were showered with cluster bombs”; an allegation that refutes the Pentagon’s claim of “precision bombing”. ...

posted by Me | 11:11 AM

Escaping blame for Abu Ghraib
SOLDIERS face jail. Commanders get 15-gun salutes. Soldiers are pilloried. White House officials are promoted. The cost of hypocrisy in the billowing prison abuse scandal has not mattered much up to now. Tomorrow we might care a lot more. The next victim of the hypocrisy could be you or me.

This week there was a hearing for Lynndie England, the soldier who became the face of Abu Ghraib for two photos, one in which she held a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash and a second in which she smiled while pointing at the genitals of another detainee.

Her lawyers want the photos thrown out as evidence, saying she was pressured to pose for them by superior officers. Lawyers for the Army, of course, deny this. If England is convicted, she could get up to 38 years in prison. Another hearing was scheduled this week for three soldiers accused of smothering an Iraqi general to death in an interrogation. They may get life behind bars.

Superiors dream of adding stars to their bars. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander in Iraq during the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, returned to his base in Germany in October to a 15-gun salute. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz praised Sanchez on behalf of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his "courage, his perseverance, and his concern for his troops." Sanchez was passed over for one possible four-star promotion in the wake of Abu Ghraib. But the Los Angeles Times reported later in October that Rumsfeld and Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, still want to make him a four-star general despite Army reports indicating that Sanchez approved of controversial interrogation tactics and did not move quickly to halt abuse....

posted by Me | 10:53 AM

Is the Bush Administration Certifiable?
Has President Bush lost his grip on reality?

In his December 1 speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia, President Bush again declared his intention to pre-emptively attack "enemies who plot in secret and set out to murder the innocent and the unsuspecting." Freedom from terrorism, Bush declared, will come only through pre-emptive war against enemies of democracy.

How does Bush know who and where these secret enemies are? How many more times will his guesses be wrong like he was about Iraq?

What world does Bush live in? The US cannot control Iraq, much less battle the rest of the Muslim world and beyond. While Bush threatened the world with US aggression, headlines revealed the futility of preemptively invading countries: "Pentagon to Boost Iraq Force by 12,000," "US Death Toll in Iraq at Highest Monthly Level," "Wounded Disabled Soldiers Kept on Active Duty."

We are getting our butts kicked in Iraq, and Bush wants to invade more countries? It is clear as day that we do not have enough troops to deal with Iraq. The 12,000 additional troops "to improve security" are being acquired by extending the combat tours of troops already on duty in Iraq. More US soldiers were killed in Iraq in November than in any previous month. The US is so hard up for troops that the Pentagon is deploying soldiers who have lost arms and legs in combat. On December 1 the Washington Post reported: "US armed forces have recently announced new efforts to keep seriously wounded or disabled soldiers on active duty."...

...According to the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, the hospital has treated 20,802 US troops for injuries received in Iraq. According to the Pentagon’s figures, 54% of the wounded are too seriously injured to return to their units. If that figure is correct, it would mean that the insurgents have put 11,233 US troops out of action. Add in the 1,254 US troops who have been killed for a total of 12,487. That’s 9% of our total force in Iraq and a much higher percentage of our combat force....

...On December 3, Russian President Vladimir L. Putin replied to Bush’s Hallifax speech by declaring Bush’s policy "dictatorial and hypocritical." Russia’s leader warned that policies "based on the barrack-room principles of a unipolar world appear to be extremely dangerous." Russian Air Force commander General Vladimir Mikhailov announced that Russia, too, can engage in pre-emptive attacks. Russia has informed neighboring Georgia that Russia might use cruise missiles and strategic bombers in preventive strikes against Chechen terrorists sheltering on Georgian territory.

Bush’s insane doctrine of pre-emptive war promises a 21st century more bloody than the 20th.

posted by Me | 7:21 AM

Sunday, December 05, 2004

17 Iraqi Workers Killed by Rebels in Attack on Bus
...Citing the deepening violence, more political leaders added their voices to a growing movement to delay the national and provincial elections now scheduled for Jan. 30. Leaders of Iraq's majority Shiite community have responded to earlier calls by insisting that the elections go forward as planned, and President Bush said Thursday that they must not be postponed.

But the political leaders who gathered in Baghdad on Sunday, mostly Sunni Arabs representing about 40 political parties and individuals, said that the insurgents' campaign of violence and intimidation made credible elections impossible for the moment, and that holding them in January would achieve an illegitimate result that could provoke further civil conflict....

...Shiite leaders in southern Iraq have deeply resented the killings of Shiite security officers and religious pilgrims in the Sunni-dominated area around Latifiya, and last month they began organizing hundreds of young men into so-called Anger Brigades. The stated goal of the brigades has been to kill extremist Sunni Arabs in the area around Latifiya in northern Babil province, known as the Triangle of Death.

The specter of civil conflict also looms over the January elections. Some Sunni political figures at the conference in Baghdad on Sunday, held at the Babylon Hotel, warned that a January election could result in a dramatically unbalanced result along sectarian lines, with many Sunni Arabs either boycotting the election or too frightened to go to the polls. Turnout is expected to be high, meanwhile, among Iraq's majority Shiites, and among the Kurds, who dominate in the north.

"A partial election will put the country into chaos," said Tariq al-Hashmi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The party, one of the better-known Sunni groups, is considering boycotting the elections, Mr. Hashmi said.

At the conference, about 40 officials signed a petition calling for a postponement, and vowed to press their case with the United Nations, the Arab League, the State Department of the United States and other world bodies....

posted by Me | 9:28 PM

Ex-CIA official: We will lose terror war
Washington, DC, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- The United States will ultimately lose the war on terror because of its policies in the Middle East and because of concerns over the human rights of militants worldwide, the former head of the CIA's team that hunted Osama bin Laden said Friday.

In a conversation with United Press International's reporters and editors, Michael Scheuer, newly revealed as the author of the bestselling book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," said bin Laden was now possibly the Arab world's most popular leader, adding al-Qaida's domination of the Internet in the Muslim world was leading to the United States losing its battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide.

Scheuer, who resigned last month from the CIA because of the agency's refusal to allow him permission to grant media interviews, added that before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the United States had between eight and 10 chances to kill bin Laden, but failed to because of inaction by the upper echelons of the U.S. bureaucracy. He said the Bush administration's claims that two-thirds of al-Qaida's leadership had been killed and destroyed were "ludicrous," noting the group functioned with terrorists, insurgents, financiers and administrators across the globe.

When asked if the United States could win the "war on terror," which was undertaken following the Sept. 11 attacks, Scheuer said: "No. It can't be won. We're going to eventually lose it. And the problem for us is that we're going to lose it much more quickly if we don't start killing more of the enemy."...

..."Unless we change or at least consider changing our policies in the Middle East, the room for bin Laden or bin Ladenism to grow is virtually unlimited," Scheuer said.

He further dismissed Western assessments that bin Laden and his group targeted the United States and Europe because they hate Western culture. He said though they might not want a Western approach to life, their goals were policy-driven.

"They're attacking us because of our unqualified support for Israel. They're attacking us because we've helped cement on their heads tyrannies in the Arab world ... for the last 40 years," he said. They're attacking us because we're in the Arabian Peninsula and it happens to be a holy place for them."...

posted by Me | 3:52 PM

Returning Fallujans will face clampdown
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- The US military is drawing up plans to keep insurgents from regaining control of this battle-scarred city, but returning residents may find that the measures make Fallujah look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised.

Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned....

...One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.

"You have to say, 'Here are the rules,' and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability," said Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, the Marine regiment that took the western half of Fallujah during the US assault and expects to be based downtown for some time....

...Most Fallujans have not heard about the US plans. But for some people in a city that has long opposed the occupation, any presence of the Americans, and the restrictions they bring, feels threatening.

"When the insurgents were here, we felt safe," said Ammar Ahmed, 19, a biology student at Anbar University. "At least I could move freely in the city; now I cannot."...

posted by Me | 9:22 AM

BushCo's Arab Democracy Project: Maybe Not
No WMDs. No connection to Al Qaida. No nuthin'. What did the neocons have left to justify the Iraq Debacle? Why their Arab Democracy Project. Well, now that seems a non-starter too. At next week's summit with our Arab allies, the Bush Arab Democracy Project, so touted by the remaining defenders of the Iraq Debacle, looks like it will be put to rest...

posted by Me | 9:20 AM

Bow Wow
...Despite the mass exodus, the incompetent one remains -Rummy. All that happened on his watch was an abysmal post-war plan and a prison scandal. This confirms that the only ones held accountable in this Administration are welfare mothers and struggling third grade students. For them, standards and accountability apply. For Rumsfeld, he is just passed along to the next grade (or term) regardless of his performance.

Holy Molly, even in Texas high school football, they have no pass, no play! Goodness gracious, Mr. President, you should know that if a kid had Rummy's record he would not be allowed to quarterback for the Crawford High School Pirates much less run the biggest defense establishment in the world! ...

posted by Me | 9:16 AM

Friday, December 03, 2004

Looking Back, Looking Forward
...The "Christian" right is simply reactionary politics with gospel lip gloss, but its fearmongering message has touched a responsive nerve among millions of Americans in and outside the Bible Belt and the movement shows little signs of abating....

posted by Me | 9:48 PM

Pastor Allegedly Used Fear Of Devil To Have Sex With Women
SAN DIEGO -- A National City pastor accused of using the fear of the devil to persuade women in his congregation to have sex with him will go on trial next year.

Carlos Romero, 59, faces up to five years and eight months in prison if convicted of three felony counts, including making a criminal threat.

Superior Court Judge William Kennedy Wednesday scheduled a pretrial hearing for Dec. 13, with trial scheduled to start Feb. 14.

At a Sept. 17 preliminary hearing, La Mesa police Sgt. Daniel Willis testified that Romero told him he was sorry for telling three women who went to his church the "devil would physically harm them and he could protect them if they had sex with him."

Willis said the pastor told him he knew his actions toward the women were wrong and he "wouldn't do it again."

A woman identified as Dora testified that she had gone to Romero's church for about a year and came back in 2000. She said she met the defendant in Fashion Valley last January.

"He told me that there was a revelation from God," Dora said. "He told me that I had already been attacked by the devil, that I could only stop this by having sexual relations with him."

Dora said she believed Romero because she considered him a "true pastor" who was "guiding us toward eternal life."...

posted by Me | 6:28 PM

It seems that 'we have never gone to war for conquest, for exploitation, nor for territory'; we have the word of a president [McKinley] for that. Observe, now, how Providence overrules the intentions of the truly good for their advantage. We went to war with Mexico for peace, humanity and honor, yet emerged from the contest with an extension of territory beyond the dreams of political avarice. We went to war with Spain for relief of an oppressed people [the Cubans], and at the close found ourselves in possession of vast and rich insular dependencies [primarily the Philippines] and with a pretty tight grasp upon the country for relief of whose oppressed people we took up arms. We could hardly have profited more had 'territorial aggrandizement' been the spirit of our purpose and heart of our hope. The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
-- Ambrose Bierce, Warlike America

posted by Me | 3:18 PM

Fundamentalist flim-flam
... But what makes this strain of Cultivated Ignorance so pernicious and virulent is the ersatz fundamentalist religious coating which Joe Conason describes in his book "Big Lies" (2003):

"No matter how many of the Right's virtucrats are caught committing the sins they claim to condemn, they pretend that they are lecturing us from the moral high ground. Are these bogus moralizers trying to deceive themselves as well as the rest of us? Or are they simply relying on the willingness of the millions of Americans to be duped? It is remarkable indeed that those trusting herds remain convinced of the moral superiority of conservatism, giving their money to ranting televangelists and their votes to ostentatiously pious politicians. Such credulous folk must be unaware of the evidence that traditional morals are declining more rapidly and more precipitously on the right-and in the so called red states-than anywhere else."...

posted by Me | 10:02 AM

A moral quandary
The goal starting out was an incredibly simple one: I wanted to explain to you, you elitist, atheistical, liberal swine, a little bit more about your decent, God-fearing, crop-growing counterparts in those big blocky states in the middle of America.

There they are, shopping at Wal-Mart and driving their Chevrolets to church on Sunday mornings in what every clichd member of the chattering class has described ad nauseam as the Red States. Yet the morally bankrupt, ethically challenged residents of much of the nation's perimeter, you included, know precisely nothing about them.

So who better to call for an understanding of this brave-hearted, pure-minded swath of America than the most brave-hearted and pure-minded within it? Certainly they would tell us about their cause to bridge this yawning divide.

To that end, the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, was first on my list. Such a fine leader, Mr. DeLay, a man of true conviction, though his staff is quick to point out that he hasn't even been indicted yet.

True, three of his associates have been charged with illegally using corporate money to influence political races in Texas, and DeLay apparently remains under investigation.

But at least his Republican colleagues in the House voted to change that pesky 11-year-old rule that would require him to step down if he's indicted, so these nice people will always have him as their moral guide.

Still, I decided to leave DeLay alone to face his legal dilemma. Next on the list of upstanding representatives of Red State America: William J. Bennett.

You know Mr. Bennett: former secretary of education, one-time national drug czar, author of "The Book of Virtues," professional moralist. When you see that perpetually pained look on his face and hear that funereal voice detailing all that is wrong with this country, you just know he represents the core of America.

But wait a minute, wasn't Bennett the one who was reported to have lost $8 million sneaking off to play slot machines and video poker? I seem to remember something about a $200,000 credit line, preferred status at four Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos, and incredible indignation on his part that anyone dare question the hypocrisy in it all.

Next up, Rush Limbaugh, the playful radio voice of the conservative movement for all these years. But no, that's wrong, too, what with the OxyContin addiction and the investigation into how he acquired the drugs.

On to Bill O'Reilly, the hard-line, hard-nosed television personality for a network, the Fox News Channel, that has come to embody much of what the pundits call Red State America. O'Reilly might be the hottest franchise on cable television, so influential that George W. Bush graced him with a lengthy interview in the teeth of the campaign season.

But what happens if O'Reilly tries to have phone sex with me, as he allegedly did with his longtime producer? Can I really ask him about the moral fiber of middle America if he keeps asking what I'm wearing?

So I look to the heroes of yore, particularly the first revolutionary in this grand Republican revolution, none other than Newt Gingrich himself. A good guy, former House speaker Gingrich, but can he really speak to moral issues like the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, given his track record with his former wives?...

posted by Me | 10:00 AM

A lesson for the religious right
IT IS unfortunate that in his attempt to address the important issue of cultural and religious divides in this country, Bernard Moon ("A lesson for the liberal elite," op ed, Nov. 30) adds to the mythical stereotypes clouding this conversation and misdirects his concern. Using one quote attributed to Andy Rooney and unnamed editorialists writing about bigoted Christian rednecks, Moon concocts a conspiracy of anti-Christian sentiment among an anonymous liberal elite.

In doing so, he blithely ignores the fact that this country is currently governed by right-wing economic and political elites and that the intelligentsia who have the most influence over policy today are also of the right. Liberal elites is a shibboleth used by those actually in power to deride any attempt to critique the status quo.

But Moon's confusion goes deeper than that. If there is a widespread conviction among those who voted against George W. Bush that his version of Christianity is one that threatens the separation of church and state, demonizes gays and lesbians, and undermines the use of science, it's because those are the policies and ideas that Bush, Karl Rove, and their comrades on the Christian right have been promulgating....

posted by Me | 9:54 AM

Mixed on war, evangelicals back Bush
Saturday, October 02, 2004

...Evangelical Christians are comfortable with the Republican president because they see him as one of them, the group said. They like his openness about his faith, appreciate his regular references to biblical passages, and identify with the presence of prayer in life. And they agree with him on key moral issues, especially his stance against abortion and gay marriage....

...And although they generally back the commander in chief on Iraq, many express decidedly mixed feelings about the war — especially those with sons approaching the age when they could be drafted. (Bush has said the draft won’t be reinstituted.)

"I want all this stuff to be over before they get to draft age," said Zandra McEntie, a fiscal officer and independent voter, referring to her teenage sons.

Edna Wright, 44, a school nurse with three sons, agreed the prospect of a draft is a "frightening thought."

Mike Burkett, the father of two teen sons, acknowledged, "I’ve really had to struggle with the whole Iraq war issue."

But the 43-year-old business analyst concluded that the United States needed to enforce United Nations sanctions on Iraq.

"There needs to be a policeman in this world," Burkett said.

That’s a big reason he’s voting for the president again.

Edna Wright’s husband, Harry, a 46-year-old lawyer who was the lone Kerry supporter in the group, said his decision was influenced by a pair of mission trips to Asia.

"My perception is that Americans are now perceived differently — and more negatively — overseas because of the war in Iraq," he said. "I’m not an enthusiastic supporter of John Kerry, but I’m uncomfortable with where we are, and I think we need a change."...

...During a retreat last month at a church camp near Loudonville, Ohio, the senior minister of one of the nation’s largest churches told several hundred men that the stage is set for anarchy in the United States because no society has ever survived without a moral conscience.

"I think we have more reasons to start a revolution than they did in 1776," said Bob Russell, senior pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Ky., attended by about 18,000.

"They had taxation without representation; we have imposed morality without representation. . . . I don’t see how you can be a dedicated Christian and remain neutral." ...

posted by Me | 9:47 AM

You're Nothing But Dirty, Dirty Sinners, Boys and Girls!
...The curriculum also teaches: "The father gives the bride to the groom because he is the one man who has had the responsibility of protecting her throughout her life. He is now giving his daughter to the only other man who will take over this protective role."

One book in the "Choosing the Best" series presents a story about a knight who saves a princess from a dragon. The next time the dragon arrives, the princess advises the knight to kill the dragon with a noose, and the following time with poison, both of which work but leave the knight feeling "ashamed." The knight eventually decides to marry a village maiden, but did so "only after making sure she knew nothing about nooses or poison." The curriculum concludes: "Moral of the story: Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess."...

posted by Me | 9:45 AM

Everyone is a potential torturer
All humans are capable of committing torture and other “acts of great evil”. That is the unhappy conclusion drawn from an analysis of psychological studies.

Over 25,000 psychological studies involving eight million participants support this finding, say Susan Fiske and colleagues at Princeton University in New Jersey, US.

The researchers considered the circumstances surrounding how individuals committed seemingly inexplicable acts of abuse in the midst of the US military’s torture of Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004.

“Could any average 18-year-old have tortured these prisoners? I would have to answer: ‘Yes, just about anyone could have.’”, Fiske says.

Many forms of behaviour, including acts of cruelty, are influenced as much by authority figures, peer pressure and other social interactions as by the psychology of the individual, she says.

“If we don’t understand the importance of social context and accept that almost anybody could commit acts of torture under certain circumstances, then we are setting ourselves up for situations where Abu Ghraib [atrocities] will occur again,” Fiske warns....

posted by Me | 7:45 AM

On War
The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with stories of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, self-important memoirs by amoral statesmen who make wars but do not know war. The vanquished know the essence of war—death. They grasp that war is necrophilia. They see that war is a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. They know how war fosters alienation, leads inevitably to nihilism, and is a turning away from the sanctity and preservation of life. All other narratives about war too easily fall prey to the allure and seductiveness of violence, as well as the attraction of the godlike power that comes with the license to kill with impunity.

But the words of the vanquished come later, sometimes long after the war, when grown men and women unpack the suffering they endured as children, what it was like to see their mother or father killed or taken away, or what it was like to lose their homes, their community, their security, and be discarded as human refuse. But by then few listen. The truth about war comes out, but usually too late. We are assured by the war-makers that these stories have no bearing on the glorious violent enterprise the nation is about to inaugurate. And, lapping up the myth of war and its sense of empowerment, we prefer not to look. ...

...Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not. Those who defy the machine usually become its victim. And Lieutenant Fick, who we find in the epilogue has left the Marines to go back to school, wonders if he was a good officer or if his concern for his men colored his judgment. Those who make war betray those who fight it. This is something most enlisted combat veterans soon understand. They have little love for officers, tolerating the good ones and hoping the bad ones are replaced or injured before they get them killed. Those on the bottom rung of the military pay the price for their commanders' vanity, ego, and thirst for recognition. These motives are hardly exclusive to the neocons and the ambitious generals in the Bush administration. They are a staple of war. Homer wrote about all of them in The Iliad as did Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead. Stupidity and callousness cause senseless death and wanton destruction. That being a good human being—that possessing not only physical courage but moral courage—is detrimental in a commander says much about the industrial slaughter that is war.

Combat has an undeniable attraction. It is seductive and exciting, and it is ultimately addictive. The young soldiers, trained well enough to be disciplined but encouraged to maintain their naive adolescent belief in invulnerability, have in wartime more power at their fingertips than they will ever have again. From being minimum-wage employees at places like Burger King, looking forward to a life of dead-end jobs, they catapult to being part of, in the words of the Marines, "the greatest fighting force on the face of the earth." The disparity between what they were and what they have become is breathtaking, intoxicating. Their intoxication is only heightened in wartime when all taboos are broken. Murder goes unpunished and is often rewarded. The thrill of destruction fills their days with wild adrenaline highs, strange grotesque landscapes that are almost hallucinogenic, and a sense of purpose and belonging that overpowers the feeling of alienation many left behind. They become accustomed to killing, carrying out acts of slaughter with no more forethought than they take to relieve themselves...

...These Marines have learned the awful truth about our civil religion. They have learned that our nation is not righteous. They have understood that there are no transcendent goals at the heart of our political process. The Sunday School God that blesses our nation above all others vanishes in war zones like Iraq. These young troops disdain the teachers, religious authorities, and government officials who feed them these lies. This is why so many combat veterans hate military shrinks and chaplains, whose task is largely to patch them up with the old clichés and ship them back to the battlefield. It is why they feel distance and anger with those at home who drink in the dark elixir of blind patriotism, and absorb mythology about themselves and war....

posted by Me | 7:39 AM

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Hollow pledge:The problem with "under God"
The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether “under God” should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil religion with any kind of robust Christianity. If one considers Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the “God” Americans are to pledge their nation to be “under” is at worst an idol and at best the true God’s name taken in vain....

...Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s opinion summarizes the basic attitude underlying the theologically germane aspects of the government’s argument and the court’s response. Mindful of legal and constitutional precedents, Rehnquist knew that the God-phrase must be stripped of theological content to qualify as an admissible declaration in a government-sanctioned pledge. He asserts bluntly that the pledge, with the God-phrase, is not a “religious exercise.” The pledge instead “is a declaration of belief in allegiance and loyalty to the United States flag and the Republic that it represents.” As a “commendable patriotic exercise,” the object of the pledge is to unify and otherwise promote the good of the nation....

... Short of hanging on to the muddy, vacillating devices of ceremonial deism, Christians appear to face one of two choices. One is the open, deliberate restoration of Christian theocracy. Then the referent of “God” in the pledge would be clear and honest. Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics lean in this direction, but gingerly and equivocatingly, if not disingenuously, because of the sheer infeasibility of theocracy in a pluralistic America. With most contemporary Christians, I would argue that theocracy is not only politically dangerous but theologically disastrous.

We are on much more solid theological ground if we turn to the other choice. That choice is to recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God’s will in history. The church catholic stretches throughout the world and is its own “public,” crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as “citizens with the saints,” Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.

This means and entails many things. In the case of the pledge it means that atheists should not be alone in hoping to see this “God” dropped from it. Faithful and thoughtful Christians should also want the pledge to be returned to its pre-1954 form, and thereby end any pretense of embracing a henotheistic God or cheapening their own faith language.

posted by Me | 7:55 PM

CBS and NBC shut door on church ad
As church bells chime in the background, a burly bouncer guards the velvet ropes at the church entrance.

"No, step aside, please," he tells two men holding hands. "I don't think so," he says to a young black girl, blocking her entrance. A Hispanic man and a person in a wheelchair also are denied entry.

The scene fades to black and a message: "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we."

Hoping to boost the numbers of a dwindling denomination, the United Church of Christ launched a nationwide television ad campaign Wednesday, banking on this 30-second spot to let all viewers know they are welcome in the pews.

But two major networks have declined to air the ad, deeming it too controversial because it champions one side of the public debate on gay relationships....

... "CBS and NBC seem to be afraid, not of stirring controversy, but of alienating potential viewers, the kind, moreover, that like to organize boycotts and write letters," Wolfe said. "There may be a new form of political correctness arising in America, one in which attempts are made to avoid violating the sensibilities, not of women or racial minorities, but of conservative Christians."...

posted by Me | 4:14 PM

U.S. Says Terrorism Net Must Be Wide
Even a 'little old lady in Switzerland' who gave money unwittingly to extremists could end up in Guantanamo, judge is told by a federal official.

WASHINGTON — Under detailed questioning by a federal judge, government lawyers asserted Wednesday that the U.S. military could hold foreigners indefinitely as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, even if they aided terrorists unintentionally and never fought the United States.

Could a "little old lady in Switzerland" who sent a check to an orphanage in Afghanistan be taken into custody if, unbeknownst to her, some of her donation was passed to Al Qaeda terrorists? asked U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green.

"She could," replied Deputy Associate Atty. Gen. Brian Boyle. "Someone's intention is clearly not a factor that would disable detention." It would be up to a newly established military review panel to decide whether to believe her and release her.

Boyle said the military could pick any foreigner who provided support to terrorists or might know of their plans. And the foreigners held on the U.S. naval base in Cuba "have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court," Boyle told the judge. ...

...Green asked if a hypothetical resident of England who taught English to the son of an Al Qaeda leader could be detained. Boyle said he could because "Al Qaeda could be trying to learn English to stage attacks there," and he compared that aid to "those shipping bullets to the front." Some detainees have been picked up in Bosnia and others in Africa.

Noting the Supreme Court said detention was to keep combatants from returning to the battlefield, Green asked: "What and where is the battlefield the U.S. military is trying to detain the prisoners from returning to? Africa? London?"

Boyle: "The conflict with Al Qaeda has a global reach."

posted by Me | 11:26 AM

Christian Killers?
There is no doubt that many of the soldiers responsible for the recent death and destruction in Fallujah are Christians. And there is no doubt that many Americans who call for more death and destruction in Iraq and elsewhere are Christians as well.

Christian Killers.

The phrase should be a contradiction in terms. If someone referred to Christian adulterers, Christian drug addicts, Christian prostitutes, Christian pimps, Christian gangsta rappers, or Christian acid rockers, most Christians would get an extremely perplexed look on their face. But when Christians in the military continue killing for the state, and Christians not in the military call for more killing in the name of the state, many Christians don’t even raise an eyebrow.

In some respects, this is the fault of religious "leaders." Christians in the pew are in many cases just blindly following their pastors, priests, elders, and ministers who, instead of preaching the gospel, are preaching the same pro-war politics their congregation hears on the Sean Hannity radio show or else they are not denouncing the debacle in Iraq for what it is: unscriptural, immoral, and unconstitutional. Conservative religious leaders are in some cases nothing more than cheerleaders for George Bush and the Republican Party.

But even if a Christian hears nothing but pro-war propaganda from the pulpit, it is still no excuse, for Christians have access to the truth if they will just put forth the effort to look for it. They have a Bible they can read for themselves....

...What is a Christian (or anyone) going to do when he faces God at the Judgment and has to give an account of his actions? Suppose he is asked a simple question: "Why did you kill those people defending their homes in Iraq?" And suppose he replied: "Because the U.S. government told me to." What do you suppose would be the Lord’s reaction to such a reply? But what else could a man say? He could not say that the United States was under attack. He could not say that Iraq was a threat to the United States. He could not say that he was protecting his family. He could not say that he was protecting his property. He could not even legitimately say that he was protecting himself, since he was in fact a trespasser on someone else’s property intending to do the owner great bodily harm.

"Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And all the people shall say, Amen" (Deuteronomy 27:25).

posted by Me | 7:13 AM

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
-- Aristotle

posted by Me | 3:34 PM

The Spy Who Loved Me
...From early in my involvement as a Christian working with national security, I have marveled at the striking analogy between intelligence work and missionary work. When you strip away the divergent settings, both represent efforts to recruit (convert) other human beings into doing something that does not conform with their local culture or upbringing. To prepare for his task, the intelligence officer like the missionary invests time in learning the target's language, the culture, the locale, and the best way to deliver the message. The missionary often finds it difficult to develop a convert in the same way an intelligence officer finds it difficult to recruit. Both need empathy with the target that is real, based in a mutual conviction that some higher value is more important than the particular agendas of either party in the relationship. The intelligence officer trusts that his country in some sense embraces a Right, a Good, that deserves to be served. The missionary, of course, believes in a divine-human Person greater than any one person on earth.

Like their counterparts in espionage, missionaries are alert to the potential of walk-ins. Indeed, much missionary labor today asks Christians to be living witnesses within a culture where people would not respond to a direct message. They seek to enhance the possibility that walk-ins will walk in. And just as intelligence officers often depend on networks of people to help with protection, access and support, so missionaries involved in church planting are building networks that reinforce their work....

posted by Me | 2:17 PM

Falwell Labels Political Foe ‘Anti-America’
...On Monday the newspaper devoted a “Nashville Eye” op-ed piece to a rebuttal of Land by David Harkness, a retired Presbyterian minister who attended a Southern Baptist college and seminary.

“I’m an Eagle Scout, graduate of Baylor University and Southern Baptist Seminary and am now a retired Presbyterian minister,” Harkness wrote. “My wife, a Mississippi College graduate, and I raised two wonderful Christian daughters, one a registered nurse, the other a teacher. I served 32 months in the Army and was commissioned an officer by President Harry Truman. I voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, and have voted in every election since.

“Now I learn from you that I am not a ‘real American.’

“As an ‘unreal American’ saved by Jesus Christ, I find it impossible to meditate on His words ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ while supporting a pre-emptive, unnecessary war against an undefined enemy, ordered by a president who claims to be led by God, that has killed close to 150,000 innocent Iraqi people and more than 1,200 U.S. soldiers, seriously injuring tens of thousands more people. And $200 billion of taxpayers’ money? How much food, education and medical care could this have provided for Americans?”

“You expend enormous amounts of energy to protect the unborn while collateral damage in Iraq has slain thousands of women, many pregnant, and killed or maimed thousands of little children,” Harkness said later in the article. “What greater hypocrisy can one practice?”

“So, Mr. Land, please don’t ask me to accept your Jesus. I’m content to remain an ‘'unreal American’ and to seek the true Jesus whose mission is redemption, forgiveness and love which, if taken seriously, could indeed heal our serious polarization and make of all of us--reds and blues--reconciled real American sisters and brothers.”

Charles Deweese of the Brentwood-based Baptist History and Heritage Society had a letter in Sunday’s paper saying the Land interview “reveals what SBC leaders really stand for today.”

“These leaders talk traditional Baptist values,” Deweese said. “What they actually practice is anti-traditional faith that is nationalized, politicized, militarized, chauvinized, fundamentalized and opportunized.”

posted by Me | 10:50 AM

The Glories and Pathologies of Texocentrism
...More than any previous visit, one enters Texas aware that this is the state running the world—via that man in the White House, who will rule for another four dreadful years of war, debt, and arrogance, and cultural decline. All charms aside, this is a fact difficult to ignore. I've always adored Texas, but this paradox requires some rethinking of relationship between culture and politics.

The political culture here is dominated by white Christian males who enthusiastically voted for Bush by 75%. Add the words conservative and protestant to the mixed and you have a consensus for Bush that approaches nearly 100%. One doubts that any dictator or Pope in the history of the world enjoyed such universal uncritical support from a dominant group.

Yet in casual discussions with actual members of this group—having cleverly won their trust by being a white male myself—I found virtually no awareness of any of the basic facts concerning the ballooning budget, the chaos and bloodshed of Iraq, the vast expansion of federal power, the shredding of civil liberties, or anything else.

To speak of these matters comes across as boring and irrelevant as a lecture on the chemical properties of the rings of Saturn. All Texans know is that their man in Washington guarding their interests, slaying bad guys, and doing something to make everyone really prosperous. The big threats they see on the horizon are gay marriage and Islam—sentiments easily manipulated by a cynical political elite.

These charming and peaceful people who go on about what the Middle East needs now are the same ones who routinely and dismissively refer to non-Texans as Yankees, with a studied indifferentism. Iraqi, Iowan, it's all the same to them. It's bad enough that the people of the state to have given the world this man and celebrated his works, but to have done so with willful ignorance of what he has done to the country and the world, and with little concern for the fate of anyone but themselves, this is really unforgivable....

posted by Me | 10:04 AM

Guinea Pig Kids
Vulnerable children in some of New York's poorest districts are being forced to take part in HIV drug trials.

During a nine month investigation, the BBC has uncovered the disturbing truth about the way authorities in New York City are conducting the fight against Aids.

HIV positive children - some only a few months old - are enrolled in toxic experiments without the consent of guardians or relatives.

In some cases where parents have refused to give children their medication, they have been placed in care.

The city's Administration of Children's Services (ACS) does not even require a court order to place HIV kids with foster parents or in children's homes, where they can continue to give them experimental drugs. ...

...Dr David Rasnick from the University of Berkeley who has studied the effects of HIV drugs on patients - particularly children - says these drugs are "lethal".

"The young are not completely developed yet," he says. "The immune system isn't completely mature until a person's in their teens." ...

posted by Me | 8:48 AM

The 'Cops' State
...One night, several of us were watching the latest installment of a feature about patrolling with US forces in Iraq on CNN International. For several days, CNN had been broadcasting video of American soldiers banging down doors, yelling at Iraqis, forcing people on the ground and rifling through homes in pursuit of resistance fighters and supporters. Not the same video, but the same technique, applied over and over again, at house after house.

"Have you ever seen anything like that?" Shaadi asked, visibly angry at the way the Americans treated the Iraqis.

Yes, actually, I have, I told him. This is like watching an episode of Cops. Only the video and audio are worse.

"What's that?"

I had a hard time believing Fox never packaged one of its earliest hits for broadcast abroad – especially in the Middle East, where American pop culture is consumed so eagerly. So I explained it – a video crew wanders around with a police officer or two, records everything, and then neatly edits the presentable bits together into a half-hour long show. And based on what we were watching, I explained that what were seeing was fairly typical of American police techniques, although the soldiers are a little more intense. This busting into an Iraqi villa, this is little different than what American cops would do in any American city. And little different than what we'd see in the final edit.

Shaadi shook his head and laughed.

"You people are f****d up!"

The statement was so obviously true on the face of it, I never bothered to ask Shaadi what he meant. ...

...The show's narrative also implies – something too easily assumed by those for whom political and social power is generally wielded – that folks who get themselves chased, arrested, and detained generally deserve it.

Don't want trouble with the police? Then don't cause any. Don't want to get bombed and invaded by America? Then do what it says....

posted by Me | 7:21 AM