Author: Greg Saunders

Dubya’s been acting like a tough guy all week with promises to veto bills on highway spending…

The Senate overwhelmingly passed a transportation bill Tuesday that would plow billions into highway and transit projects through the end of the decade, but states say that isn’t enough to keep pace with growing traffic congestion.

Approval of the $295 billion measure sets up a showdown with the House, which has passed a $284 billion bill. The administration is threatening to veto any bill authorizing more than that amount.

…and stem cell research.

President George W. Bush said he would veto legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives that would ease restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.

“I have made very clear to the Congress that the use of taxpayer money to promote science that destroys life in order to save life, I am against that,” Bush told reporters in at the White House before meeting with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. “If the bill does that, I will veto it.”

Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it. Bush hasn’t issued a single veto during his presidency, so why should we believe him now? As you can tell from this speech he made two years ago, he’s fond of patting himself on the back, but rarely follows through.

“I can assure you I will work with Congress to control excessive federal spending. One reason they give the President the veto power is to make sure the Congress doesn’t over-spend. Over-spending could serve as an anchor on economic vitality and growth.”

Even after bragging that he’d use his power to control spending, he’s earned the wrath of conservative think tanks for out of control budgets and he’s done nothing about record levels of pork-barrel spending. This can really lead us to one of two conclusions : He doesn’t really care about the things he claims to or he’s a spineless coward who’s unwilling to stand up to special interests. Either way, Little George’s veto threats are toothless and should be ignored.

It’s heartening to read the letter that Tom printed below from Scott in Nashville. I’ve received plenty of letters and comments along these lines in response to the religious posts I’ve done in the past and it leads me to this question : Are you also saying those things to your fellow Christians or just smartass atheists like me¹ who to like to take cheap shots at the religious wrong? I’m grateful that there are Christians who are willing to fight the stereotype that conservative fundamentalists represent all of Christianity, but correcting misconceptions is only one piece of the puzzle². As Bruce Bawer explains in his excellent book “Stealing Jesus”³, Christians need to reclaim their religion from the radical right :

In recent years, [conservative] Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think only of the [conservative] variety. The mainstream media, in covering the so-called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to choose from : The God-of-wrath Christian Right and the godless secular Left. Many Americans scarcely realize that there is any third alternative.
. . .
[Conservative Christianity] 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, quite often, it denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology. In essence, then, it has stolen Jesus-yoked his name and his church to ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that would have appalled him.

And let’s face it, it’s not too hard to jump to the conclusion that Jesus would have been appalled by fundamentalists’ devotion to “God’s Official Party”. This excerpt for the book of Luke is a perfect example of what I’m talking about :

A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good — except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.'”

“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

I doubt there are many religious leaders who would advocate giving up everything you own and giving it to the poor, but even with a loose interpretation of this passage, it’s not to difficult to infer how Jesus would react to the men and women on both sides of the aisle who accumulate great wealth while people around the world are literally starving to death. Or leaders who are more concerned with giving tax breaks to the rich while children are dying of preventable diseases due to a lack of healthcare. Or a president who ignores the plight of millions of men and women who work multiple jobs to make a decent living because his highest priority is to destroy the safety net that keeps those same people from spending the last years of their lives as paupers.

I hope this doesn’t come off as preachy or patronizing when I say that it’s time for Christians to take back Jesus from the theological kidnappers of of the far-right. The conservative extremist brand of Christianity is an aberration that doesn’t represent the mainstream and makes a mockery of the teachings of Jesus, who warned :

“Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.'”

You can be proud of your religion without proselytizing. There’s nothing pushy about saying “I voted against Bush because I’m a Christian” or reminding people that Jesus had more to say about compassion for the poor than he did about abortion, homosexuality, or judicial activism. Considering how much our President is fond of telling the public how much he loves Jesus, it’s fair game to point out how skewed his priorities are when held up to the teachings in the gospels.

The perception that Christianity is an exclusively right-wing religion isn’t going to go away until the silent majority of Christians stand up and take their religion back. Yes, you should correct people on the far left who make the mistake of assuming everyone who reads the Bible is in league with Fred Phelps, but you should be equally vigilant in regards to the mainstream press. If an AP article uses the word “Christian” to describe Pat Robertson without qualifying it with an adjective like “evangelical”, write a letter to the editor. If CNN implies that someone is conservative because they’re religious, flood their switchboard with complaints. Most of all, don’t let anyone get away with implying that you’re betraying your own faith just because you disagree with the Republican party.

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^{1 : I’m describing myself here, not accusing anyone of labeling me as such.}

2 : But it’s an important piece. I often try to be sensitive to these sorts of things, which is why I make an effort to never use the word “Christianity” when referring to the extreme-right without qualifying it with terms like “conservative”, “fundamentalist”, or “lunatic”.

3 : You can read an excerpt of the book here.

Josh Marshall does a great job of explaining the severity of the Republican “constitutional” option :

Just to be crystal clear, what the senate is about to do is not changing their rules. They are about to find that their existing rules are unconstitutional, thus getting around the established procedures by which senate rules can be changed.
. . .
For that to be true stands not only the simple logic of the constitution, but two hundred years of our constitutional history, on its head. You don’t even need to go into the fact that other judicial nominations have been filibustered, or that many others have been prevented from coming to a vote by invocation of various other senate rules, both formal and informal, or that almost countless numbers of presidential nominees of all kinds have simply never made it out of committee. Indeed, the whole senate committee system probably cannot withstand this novel and outlandish interpretation of the constitution, since one of its main functions is to review presidential appointees before passing them on to the full senate.

Quite simply, the senate is empowered by the constitution to enact its own rules.

You can think the filibuster is a terrible idea. And you may think that it should be abolished, as indeed it can be through the rules of the senate. And there are decent arguments to made on that count. But to assert that it is unconstitutional because each judge does not get an up or down vote by the entire senate you have to hold that the United States senate has been in more or less constant violation of the constitution for more than two centuries.

I’m not usually one for slippery slope arguments, but this certainly looks like it would pour a can of oil on our proverbial slope. Would this abrupt decision to declare the Senate rules unconstitutional undermine the entire committee system? That would pretty much grind the Senate to a halt. What would this mean in regards to everything else the Senate has accomplished over the last 200 years? What would this mean for the thousands of pieces of legislation that have been killed in committee over the last two centuries? Is there anything in this precedent that would compell the Senate to reconsider bills that had previously been discarded under the “unconstitutional” rules? Are these few judges really worth opening up this can of worms for?

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the people who are supposed to keep the President safe. First there was the potential terrorist attack that wasn’t as important as Bush’s bicycle ride :

The White House launched an investigation Thursday into the 47- minute delay in notifying President Bush about the intrusion of a single- engine aircraft into restricted airspace over the nation’s capital that provoked emergency evacuations.

The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute-long “red alert” at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn’t told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50 p.m. — 47 minutes after the “red alert” was issued and 36 minutes after an all-clear.
. . .
McClellan said Secret Service agents accompanying Bush to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Md., and the uniformed military aide who accompanies the president with the nuclear warfare launch codes had been in touch with authorities at the White House during the scare.

And now we find out that the “dud” grenade in Georgia was an assassination attempt :

The FBI said on Wednesday a grenade thrown at President George W. Bush during a visit to Georgia last week had been a threat to the American leader and had only failed to explode because of a malfunction.

In a statement, a Federal Bureau of Investigation official at the U.S. embassy said the grenade, thrown while Bush made a keynote speech in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square on May 10, had been live and landed within 30 metres (100 feet) of the president.
. . .
The FBI’s statement contradicted an account by Georgian police at the time who said the grenade was a dud, left at the spot to sow panic among the tens of thousands who turned out to greet Bush.

A White House spokesman also said then that Bush, who had visited the ex-Soviet republic to show support for its pro-Western government, had never been in danger.

These security guys had better watch their backs. If they continue screwing up this bad they might end up getting nominated for an ambassadorship or something.

In case you missed it, British MP George Galloway gave an incendiary speech before the U.S. Senate’s committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal.

Now, senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq, which killed a million Iraqis, most of them children. Most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis, With the misfortune to be born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq.

And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies. I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we’re in today.

Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth. Have a look at the real oil- for-food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months, when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and the other American corporations that stole Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer. Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where. Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it. Have a look at the real scandal, breaking in the newspapers today. Revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee, that the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians; the real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own government.

The always great Crooks and Liars has the video and an MP3 of this portion of the speech. Earlier in his address, Galloway also threw a couple more pointed barbs at the Bush Administration :

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country – a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.
. . .
You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I’ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he’s your prisoner, I believe he’s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

I’m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances.

I long for a day when our lawmakers are equally blunt.