A Babbling Stream of Semi-Consciousness
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Good questions from Mark Schmitt, discovered via Earl Bockenfeld:
The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior?
It’s been quite a few years since my heavy Bible-reading days. I remember Jesus. He was a healer and a great teacher.
He said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” And “Him that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” I’ve been out of touch. Listening to the voices from the Religious Right these past few days, I guess they must have a different guy in there now.
Personally, I liked the old guy.
A few election day stories from The Other Paper, a free news and entertainment tabloid here in Columbus, Ohio:
In Whitehall, a woman in line became faint, and officials called the squad. The medics arrived and put her on a gurney, but she insisted they not take her away until she voted. They put an oxygen mask on her and hooked her up to IVs, then wheeled her over to the booth so she could vote.
It started raining pretty hard at Thurber Towers on Neil Avenue, but even then no one left. Some people took out umbrellas, others just stood there in the rain. One old guy, probably 80 or 85, came out of the retirement center carrying a little folding chair and set it up at the end of our line, in the rain, to wait. No one seemed upset. One woman said, “I’ve waited four years for this. I can wait another two hours.”
A fifth-grader making homeroom announcements at Hubbard Elementary School asked the students to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, at which point everyone waiting to vote stopped talking, took off hats, turned and faced the flag, and said the pledge together.
I heard from several people there that one of the voting machines at Rosehill Elementary School in Reynoldsburg showed up with 500 votes for Bush already “in,” but they were quickly erased.
It’s discouraging to lose an election. It’s hard, sometimes, to keep fighting. But we have to do it. For all the people, right or wrong, who waited in line to cast a vote.
Recently there’s been a lot of attention paid to the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. They were added to the pledge in the 1950s, and there has been a debate lately about whether they belong there.
We’ve been worrying about the wrong words. Based on the eleven states that amended their constitutions to alienate selected citizens from their inalienable rights, we should have been worrying about “liberty and justice for all.”
Something tells me George W. Bush is finally trying to complete his Air National Guard obligation.
Bob Herbert writes that it’s time for progressive-minded folks to get back to work:
Here’s my advice: You had a couple of days to indulge your depression – now, get over it. The election’s been lost but there’s still a country to save…
Democracy is a breeze during good times. It’s when the storms are raging that citizenship is put to the test. And there’s a hell of a wind blowing right now.
Tom Paine said it well:
These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Finally, from Harriet Tubman:
Children, if you’re tired, keep going. If you’re hungry, keep going. If you’re scared, keep going. If you want to taste freedom, keep going.
At a press conference about the election and his second term, George W. Bush said, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”
Actually, George, you’ve already spent your political capital. You lost the election of 2000, yet you acted as if you had a mandate for a radical political agenda.
The Senate was divided 50-50, so you used the vice-president’s tie-breaking vote to prevent any kind of power-sharing with Democratic senators. You pushed your agenda with such little regard for bipartisan cooperation that Republican Senator Jim Jeffords quit your party in disgust, became an Independent, and started voting with the Democrats.
When the attacks of 9/11 united all Americans—all the world—you immediately started looking for ways to turn that tragedy into a partisan bonanza. The day after the attacks, Secretary Rumsfeld argued against striking Al Qaeda, using the tragedy instead as the pretense for an attack on Iraq, even though they’d had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.
You’ve spent your political capital, George. You’ve blown through it just like you blew through the budget surplus you inherited from the Clinton Administration.
You’ve got a deep deficit, George. You owe us.
On Tuesday, we had the highest voter turnout since 1968. The American people came out to speak loud and clear. I’m still having these little “aw, crap” moments, when I get a new perspective on what Tuesday’s election means:
George W. Bush will probably name at least three new Supreme Court justices during the next four years. With GOP gains in the Senate, he can push through extremist judges who will blight our laws for thirty years to come.
I’m 52 years old. I’m not likely to live to see the end of the darkness that fell on Tuesday.
Abraham Lincoln:
It is said that an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”
How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”
And yet let us hope that it be not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath us and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.
God help us.
You’ve got to hand it to George W. Bush. The man’s got gall. The president demanded an end to United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq, so that he could launch a war to destroy weapons that did not exist. When John Kerry dares to point out that the Bush Administration lost track of hundreds of tons of explosives that did exist, Bush says this:
a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.
He’s right. I definitely don’t want George W. Bush as my commander in chief.
Maureen Dowd, in a Rolling Stone interview, on the subject of George Bush, father and son:
The father went to war in Iraq to defend the principle that you can’t invade another country unilaterally; the son goes to war with Iraq to establish the principle that you can invade another country unilaterally.
Now this is the kind of product I can heartily endorse.
Use it, and use it vigorously.
I’m a Democrat. When I watched the presidential debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000, I was rooting for Gore, but I came out of the debates believing that neither candidate would be a total disaster for America.
It wasn’t the first time I’ve been wrong.
I wasn’t dazzled by Bush’s intellect, but I knew he would be surrounded by smart people if he won the election. I couldn’t have imagined where those advisers were going to lead the country.
On September 12, 2001, while a pall of smoke still hung over the Pentagon, while fire still raged deep in the rubble of the fallen towers of the World Trade Center, when most Americans still felt physically shaken by shock and horror and rage, Donald Rumsfeld argued that, rather than the al Qaeda murderers, we should be targeting Iraq. Richard Clarke, the Administration’s counterterrorism chief, responded that “Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” From Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies:
Powell shook his head. “It’s not over yet.”
Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq.
At the time, I didn’t know about this. In the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks, I fell in line behind the President, along with Americans from across the political spectrum. Our differences with Bush on other issues were secondary—we were Americans first. After a shaky start, Bush seemed to be rising to the challenge. I said it would be hard to imagine a better team for this crisis: the many advisers who had been involved in the Gulf War would understand the complexities of a region with a different culture, and having learned from earlier mistakes, would avoid the missteps that less experienced people might make. I really believed that.
Now I’m against Bush. I’m not middle-of-the-road about it, either. I’m ranting. I’m raving. It’s not because of his tax and economics policies, or his record-busting deficits, or his education policies, or his environmental policies, or his unilateral abandonment of international treaties, or any of the other issues where civilized gentlemen may respectfully disagree. I’ve been betrayed. I put my trust in Bush and his team, and they used that trust dishonorably. That’s why I rant and rave against Bush.
Richard Cohen, a columnist I respect, takes Bush-haters to task. Referring to the so-called Red states and Blue states, he says, “I live in a state of my own… My own state of mind combines some of the blue with some of the red to produce my own political hue. Color me purple.”
I nevertheless cannot bring myself to hate Bush or, as someone here told me, to consider his possible reelection as a reason to leave the country. In fact, Bush haters go so far they wind up adding a dash of red to my blue, pushing me by revulsion into a color I otherwise would not have…
The demonization of Bush is going to cost John Kerry plenty if it hasn’t already. It so overstates the case against Bush that a levelheaded listener would be excused for thinking that there isn’t one in the first place. It squeezes the middle, virtually forcing moderates to pick which bunch of nuts they’re going to join.
He has a point. I’ve read a lot of anti-Bush blogs lately. Some of them scare me.
I’m convinced that George W. Bush is bad for America. One reason is that he seems to lack that tiny little nugget of self-doubt that allows one to entertain the possibility that he is wrong.
I don’t want to be like that.
On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart made the case for George W. Bush’s determined leadership in the Iraq war:
He drove us into a wall, but he didn’t blink.