The Mean Season
The 2006 Election
When we meet God, when we see Jesus, He will be wholly unconcerned about all the hard work you did defeating that ballot initiative or getting Senator Bigot elected. Our God will want to know how efficiently we spent our time here reaching souls for Christ, not how hard we worked to make our life here a Capra-esque fantasy whitewash. After all, at the end of the day, we’re only making our bed in a burning building.
Senator Tim Johnson
(D-South Dakota), a man many of us have never heard of,
continues to make “significant improvement” after brain surgery
and his prognosis is very good. Which likely disappoints many
Republicans and, for that matter, many conservative church
pastors still reeling from the Democrats’ takeover of Congress
in the recent election. And that is precisely how mean this
political season is: both liberal and conservative vultures
circling the hospital room of a man neither could have cared
much about before his stroke.
South Dakota’s Republican governor, Mike Rounds, would appoint a
replacement if Johnson’s seat were vacated by his death or
resignation. A Republican appointee would create a 50-50 tie and
effectively allow the GOP to retain Senate control because of
Vice President Dick Cheney’s tie-breaking vote.
Thus, Johnson is big news and high stakes for the soulless
goblins on either side of the political divide, as the
bare-knuckle Hatfield and McCoys feud moves to another level.
The recent midterm elections, where the American people,
including many conservative groups, finally rose from their
collective comas and voted many Republicans out of office, is
another misdirect as I don’t think Democrats deserve power. I
think they deserve what they’ve had these past six
years—nothing. Because they don’t have a single idea among them,
and they have no voice beyond that of elder statesman Bill
Clinton or way-too-soon Barack Obama. The Democrats have no
national identity, for which we need to blame DNC chair Howard
Dean, whose own blowhard antics cost him his runaway maverick
lead in 2004 (and thank God for that. I mean, who could even
imagine, now, “President Dean?!”).
The fact is, the Democrats have no vision. President Bush (well,
actually, Karl Rove) had a vision. It was a loony tunes
simpleton’s vision, the Slacker Vision of a lazy student who has
no respect for the lessons of history, but at least he had a
vision, one he could (stumblingly) articulate. The Democrats
have not, in more than a decade, had an idea about anything.
Voting them back into power may have provided cheap visceral
thrill to the millions of equally ideologically bankrupt people
who’d kept this president’s failed policies going, but, the
truth is, these voters are just making the same mistake over
again—voting their emotion over their intellect. It’s not that
we need to vote the Republicans out of power, it’s that we need
to vote *these* Republicans out of power. I’m not sure I want
the Democrats running things; I mainly wanted *different*
Republicans.
The fruits of this cutthroat political season are these: the
president is holding steady in his bunker, still refusing to
change course in Iraq while desperately looking for a graceful
way to do exactly that. With the clock ticking, both politically
and militarily, the president realizes he must, finally, find
some real options in Iraq before one or both of these things
happen: (1) some faction in Iraq topples the Vichy puppet
government Bush installed there, officially landing Iraq in a
civil war, or (2) Congress finds the sine to cut off funding,
forcing the president to withdraw. (1) is likely, (2) is not as,
again, it would require politicians to place honor above
ambition, something no U.S. politician seems capable of doing.
In the wake of the politically devastating yet ultimately
toothless report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed by
one of Bush’s father’s most trusted advisors, the president has
been taking his political lumps. Not real lumps, mind you,
considering Congress will never impeach him (again, no honor
over ambition; no Republican is going to torch his own political
future by voting to impeach Bush; something, ironically, the GOP
bullied the utterly spineless Democrats into doing to Bill
Clinton). But Bush has, finally, been forced to make some
cosmetic changes, rearranging his Titanic deck chairs with the
firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But Bush is
clearly holding out for a win in Iraq, at this writing sending
in a massive troop buildup to “restore order” there.
In spite of global opposition and now severely eroded domestic
report, Bush remains bunkered in, rejecting the advice of even
trusted friends while still playing the movie in his head where
we “win” in Iraq. Starring John Wayne or, perhaps, Ronald
Reagan.
The Bush Administration's best strategy for electoral victory in
2006 was to blame everything on, wait for it, President Clinton.
which may have come as no surprise to Clinton himself, who
seemed to revel in the opportunity the Bushie attack provided
for Clinton to unload on the current administration. Venting
what seemed like years of pent-up frustration with the current
administration, Clinton exploded on Fox News, wiping the smirk
off of interviewer Chris Wallace's face while hurling salient
points about his anti-terrorism performance in office.
I'll hasten to suggest Clinton's frustration wasn't only about
the Republicans but about the toothless Democrats, Clinton's own
party having surrendered long ago to the GOP. The Democrats have
a practically zero footprint in domestic politics. Clinton's
barrage became a rallying cry, awakening the slumbering Dems
(somewhat), although none of them could command the gravity or
gather the momentum or bombast of the former president.
This on the heels of another GOP sideshow, that of Senator
George Allen (R-VA)'s racial slur on the campaign trail. At a
campaign stop in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, the
sunburned Allen blithely launched into what, I suppose, he
considered a good-natured hazing of his opponent, Jim Webb's,
tracker, twice calling him “Macaca,” a racial slur that can
mean, “monkey.” S.R. Sidarth, who was filming the event as a
"tracker” for the opposing Jim Webb campaign, is of Indian
ancestry, but was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Joining The Club That Would Have Me
I am now pastoring at a southern Baptist church, which means,
for the most part, I tend to keep my mouth shut about most
things political. I find it ironic that I am now a part of the
very beast whose naked political aggression got us in this mess
in the first place. Increasingly, it seems my role within the
ministry is to be the Dr. McCoy to everyone’s Captain Kirk, the
guy who says, “He’s dead, Jim,” and gives common-sense advise
about the more extreme views of the Christian conservative
agenda. My own church is not linked to this online ministry, and
most of what we discuss here is not welcomed on my church’s
website. And yet, I have absolutely no doubt God has sent me
there, placed that ministry in my path and placed me in theirs.
It’s difficult to explain how this works but it does indeed
work, though it’s a little like installing Chris Rock or, more
apt, David Letterman as pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church.
This is the main reason I’ve been too busy to beat up on the
Republicans or the president lately, but, praise the Lord, the
American people seem to be doing that for me these days. Just a
nearly the entirety of the global community failed to support
President Bush’s tragically wrongheaded Iraqi invasion, the
perhaps most tragic aspect of which is the TRAGEDY is so sad, so
utterly un-spinnable by the administration, that nobody—not even
me—can gloat I told you so about it. The disaster—Bush’s
ham-fisted destabilization of the Middle East, exponential
creation of hundreds of thousands of new terrorists who all hate
us, and emboldening of extremists like the popular and
charasmatic Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and unstable
nuts like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il—is simply beyond the
scope of even my worst fears. Bush’s policies, both foreign and
domestic, have been the prattling of children, which is to do a
grave insult to the intelligence of most children.
The most tragic disaster to hit the U.S. was not 911 or Katrina
or even Pearl Harbor or Gettysburg, but was, in fact, the blind
support of a disastrously immature, isolated and myopic
dilettante president, support fueled by bare-knuckled political
greed on the part of Christian conservatives and the evil—that’s
what they are—politicians who dance whorishly for them, In the
name of Jesus Christ, and in the prosecution of their agendas of
school prayer, anti-abortion, anti-gay anything, and a general
turn back to the Leave It To Beaver 1950’s—agendas, ironically,
Jesus Christ Himself never advocated as Jesus was never
politically active in any sense whatsoever—the religious right
galvanized the massive base of support needed to elect and
re-elect this president and the miserable, spineless, greedy
bastards in Congress who rubber-stamped even the most
transparently unworkable of the president’s policies.
All of which misses the point that there has been no perceptible
movement on any of the Christian right’s key agenda issues, that
we have been sold a bill of goods by greedy politicians
promising a moral revolution in exchange for our vote, all the
while stuffing their pockets with cash, seducing underage
Congressional pages, and letting the president do whatever he
wanted, including leading the country to the very precipice of
economic disaster, political mockery and global scorn.
It is entirely fair to say that not only are we worse off than
we were six years ago, when I first warned of President Dubya,
not only is the world an exponentially, immeasurably more
dangerous place, not only has this president all but guaranteed
the most scared gal of millions of jihadists is setting off a
nuke in Times Square, but, perhaps the worst fruit of these past
six years is America is simply no longer respected globally by
anyone. We are seen as barbarians, as fools, as fat and greedy
soulless people who routinely and cold-bloodedly dismiss the
deaths of perhaps a hundred thousand Iraqis and the descent of a
stable Middle Eastern nation into genocidal tribal conflict as
we search desperately for a graceful exit that will never
present itself. One day we will simply throw our hands up and
walk away, turning Iraq over to the next brutal dictator, and
stability in the region will be achieved by measuring the
heights of stacks of dead bodies—whoever kills the most, wins.
Of Terrorists and Terrorism
Harry Belafonte once remarked that George W. Bush is a
terrorist, and white folks just lost their minds. But, the truth
is, the president has routinely used terrorist tactics to
achieve political change—in precisely the same way the Boogey
Man terrorists do. The administration routinely announced
heightened terror alerts at politically beneficial moments (such
as immediately following John Kerry's announcement of John
Edwards as his running mate).
Bush is responsible for, at minimum, ten times as many innocent
deaths as Osama bin Laden. I rarely hear anyone doing that math,
but it is true. What the military calls “collateral damage,”
—innocent lives lost due to military conflict—has now spiraled
out of control. This is the, “You break it, you own it,” Pottery
Barn rule so tragically and prophetically articulated by former
Secretary of State Colin Powell—whom I also hold personally
responsible for much of the Iraq tragedy because he could have
stopped it single handedly back in February of 2003 when he
addressed the U.N. The Bush administration traded on Powell’s
impeccable credibility by sending him to the U.N. with a sack of
lies and distortions, where Powell completely assignated himself
by making the case for the Iraq invasion, a case few at the U.N.
bought. How sad for my hero, this wonderful man, to allow
himself to be so cruelly used and humiliated that way. He would
have sacrificed himself politically but spared the world the
agony of the Bush crusade, a sad, dark time when we, as
Americans, traded in our values, our very will, in the name of
Gimme. Where we prostituted 3,030 911 deaths for political gain,
and where we gave a blank check to a man wholly unqualified to
lead us and, no matter how tragically wrong every decision he
made, we still said nothing, did nothing, still hoping for that
gay marriage or stem cell research ban. After all, what’s a few
tens of thousand dead Iraqis if we can put a stop to gay men
marrying.
Most tragic of all was how broken the political process became
after 911; how the Democrats completely lost their spine. I
blame the Democrats even more than the Republicans or Bush
himself because they abdicated their role within the political
process, them too trading in their responsibility and their
integrity in the name of political gain. Democrats have been
running to the center and even the right ever since President
Bill Clinton’s dash toward the center shortly after his election
in 1992. Post-911, no Democrat wanted to “look weak,” and so
they actually became weak by being bullied into supporting the
Iraq invasion—a crime for which I want every Democrat severely
punished.
Casualties of War
The season saw more than its fair share of casualties, not the
least of which was, hopefully, the church’s naiveté. The notion
of Ivory Soap Republican champion of the “moral” right was
soundly shattered by the scandal breaking around Representative
Mark Foley (R-Florida). A champion of child protective
legislation, Foley was the season’s highest-profile loser. As
chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children,
Foley led the charge against child predators, introducing
legislation targeting sexual predators and created stricter
guidelines for tracking them.
Wikipedia:
The Mark Foley scandal, which broke in late September 2006,
centers on solicitative e-mails and sexually explicit instant
messages sent by Mark Foley, a Republican Congressman from
Florida, to young men who had formerly served as congressional
pages. The scandal has grown to encompass the response of
Republican congressional leaders to previous complaints about
Foley's contacts with the pages and inconsistencies in the
leaders' public statements. There are also allegations that a
second Republican Congressman, Jim Kolbe, had improper conduct
with at least two youths, a 16-year old page and a recently
graduated page.
The scandal led to Foley's resignation from Congress on
September 29, 2006. It is believed to have contributed to the
Republican Party's loss of control over Congress in the November
7, 2006 election, as well as the end of House Speaker Dennis
Hastert's leadership of the House Republicans. Kirk Fordham,
chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds and former chief of staff
for Foley, also resigned as a result of the scandal.
The questionable conversations, which took place between 1995
and 2005, are under investigation by the FBI and Florida
officials for possible criminal violations. The House Ethics
Committee is investigating the response of the House Republican
leadership and their staff to earlier warnings of Foley's
conduct. In early October 2006, two news organizations quoted
anonymous former pages saying they had sexual liaisons with
Foley after turning 18 and 21.
However, the biggest disaster for the “moral” right was the
outing of Ted Haggard, The Colorado Springs black Christian
community had been rocked by Benjamin L. Reynolds’s announcement
that he is a same-gender loving person. That announcement was
itself subsequently overshadowed by the sudden outing and
subsequent confession of New Life Community Church Pastor Ted
Haggard (right). A national figure as leader of the National
Association of Evangelicals, Haggard led the charge against gay
marriage and same-sex ballot initiatives and family values
(i.e.: anti-gay) legislation before he was outed by an admitted
gay prostitute for an alleged two-year affair and drug use,
charges Haggard subsequently admitted were at least partially
true. In the classic plank-in-your-own-eye lesson of Luke
chapter 6, the white Christian community had been shaking its
head about Reynolds’s situation just when they themselves were
overcome with a much more heinous scandal on a much larger
scale, a revelation made all the more ironic to the many members
of Reynolds’ own church who had matriculated to New Life because
they’d suspected Reynolds was gay. Haggard's outing was
admittedly politically motivated, as his accuser hoped to use
the bombshell to help a same-sex ballot initiative pass in
Colorado (it failed).
House On Fire
Current U.S. House of Representatives Speaker J. Dennis Hastert
and incoming Speaker Nancy Peloski are doubtlessly pacing like
expectant fathers, hoping for the best of the worst for Senator
Johnson, a man it is unlikely either speaker had a lot of
contact with. The cruel math of Johnson’s illness underscores
how utterly inhumane this poiwer struggle is, and how, at the
end of the day, absolutely none of it has anything whatsoever to
do with God, with people, with bettering lives. It’s simple
about greedy, evil politicians ratting each other out to gain
some small political advantage.
Probably the scariest political ads I’ve ever seen were those of
a guy named Bob Beauprez, Republican representative from
Colorado. Beauprez’s campaign ads were so smarmy, so smug, I was
simply aghast that someone within his campaign actually
green-lighted them. The ads portrayed an arrogant, smirking
Beauprez, in Stetson and jeans, standing next to a horse’s rear
end, talking about the nastiness of the political season before
proceeding to talk to us like a cop at a traffic stop; arrogant,
dismissive tones with promises of what he’d do with the power of
the governor’s office.
Beauprez’s ads embodied everything I fear and despise about
politics. They were mean-spirited, arrogant in the extreme, and
appealing only to the people he was obviously speaking
exclusively to—white conservatives. The subtext was all about
how us white folks are gonna take Colorado back from the them
and the those. Anti-gay, anti-immigrant, cowboy swagger and
Cheney sneer, it was an add the Klan could have (and might have)
produced. And it embodied the zero-sum game of cutthroat ’06
politics, the Dubya-era divide-and-conquer scheme of appealing
to the largest voting block, not because you share their values
but because they have most efficient voter delivery systems.
And this is where we’re at, voting our convictions without
seeing any real results. And, yet, we keep doing it because
we’re convinced John Kerry’s going to open abortion clinics on
every street corner or that George W. will have them outlawed.
Both notions are ridiculous. Yet we keep these soulless liars in
power, and we do it in the name of Jesus. Because our pastors
said so. Because James Dobson or Ted Haggard (whoops) told us
to. And, when all the smoke clears, where are we at? How have
our issues been addressed? What progress has been made for
conservative values?
The mistake here, as it always has been, is for the church to
put its faith in the political system. The church should put its
faith in God. In Jesus Christ. The church should not be
organizing politically. “well, pastor, we have to protect our
families, our way of life.” Our lives here are not what we
should be protecting. Jesus said he who loves his life will lose
it [John 12:25]. Our job is not to protect our way of life. Our
job is to proclaim the coming of Jesus Christ, to make
disciples, to bring comfort to the poor.
As for the world going to hell in a hand basket—these are things
the Bible declares must come to pass [Matthew 24:6]; that we
should not fear them, but view them as signs of the Lord’s soon
coming.
So, what, do we just sit back and let our values be trampled on?
Let our rights be taken away? Of course not. But should we put
blind faith in any human being? Should we believe any lie told
us? Should we back any candidate who claims to be conservative
and who plays us like mandolins?
The closer we are to God, the more we allow the Holy Spirit to
guide us rather than our fears, we’ll become spiritually,
economically and, yes, spiritually empowered, becoming less like
children [Eph. 4:14] and played less like suckers by greedy,
lying politicians. The main job of politicians, both Democratic
and Republican, is to scare us into voting our fears, anger us
into voting our prejudices. The love of Christ banishes fear [1
John 4:18], builds wisdom [Prov. 1:7] and produces patience
[Jas. 1:3].
If we actually believed the Bible—believed all of it, and not
just the stuff we like—God’s word would transform us. We would
become more like Him, les fearful, les gullible, more patient.
More understanding of what scripture actually says about the
times we live in and less ignorant about the ways of God and our
role in the world. We’d stop trying to do at the ballot box what
we continue to fail to do in the pulpit. When we meet God, when
we see Jesus, He will be wholly unconcerned about all the hard
work you did defeating that ballot initiative or getting Senator
Bigot elected. Our God will want to know who efficiently we
spent our time here reaching souls for Christ, not how hard we
worked to make our life here a Capra-esque fantasy whitewash.
After all, at the end of the day, we’re only making our bed in a
burning building..
Christopher J. Priest
17 December 2006
editor@praisenet.org
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