Peddlers and Meddlers

Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution,
in which transactions are manufactured instead of products,
wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity,
and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured
while American communities fall apart  
--Greed and Debt, Matt Taibbi 

They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They’ll destroy you as well 
--Early Roman Kings,
 Bob Dylan 

Yo, we at war  
We at war with terrorism, racism  
And most of all, we at war wit ourselves  
--Jesus Walks, Kayne West 

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"One Nation Under God" and "In God We Trust" have been co-opted as the mottos of today's Republican Party and express their vision for America as voiced in their recent national convention.  Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan even bemoaned the fact that we were not MORE Christian: 

Slate wrote, "Ryan wants the Obama administration to explain why the Democratic platform doesn't include the word God in it. 'It’s not in keeping with our founding documents, our founding vision,' the VP hopeful told Fox News this morning. 'I’d guess you’d have to ask the Obama administration why they purged all this language from their platform.'"

But what about those of us who do not Trust in God?  Who speaks for us?  Why am I bound to their beliefs?  We are not "One Nation Under God," but rather a pluralistic society founded upon a humanistic philosophy which transcended the mandatory belief in a personal god.

Our government was not based upon religious belief but rather the freedom from any imperative -- governmental or otherwise -- to believe or not to believe.  Separation of Church and State was the watchword; citizens could overdose on religion, or not, depending upon their own predilections.  The bible is not the Constitution, and the Constitution is the seminal document for the United States -- a document not to be contravened by any other dogma.

The U.S. is no longer a bastion for White Anglo Saxon Protestants; their domination has been thrown to the charnal house of history. Try though the two Republican nominees might, the days of what they are peddling has past.  They cannot legislate morality any more than they can live morally.

Mitt is right: We deserve better.  But their convention did NOT tell us is how we can achieve the fabulous wealth and security that will supposedly come of bootstrap-pulling and dogma-adherence.  The Republicans say that the government has failed us, yet in a non-sequitur, advocate cutting food stamps, a program which has been successful in alleviating hunger in a nation in which one of ten of us suffers from "food insufficiency" (=hunger). For such a religious platform, their proposed policies are awfully penurious and punitive toward the poor.

Among a sea of believers in the Prince of Peace, why have we none but advocates for Warriorhood?  When did the worldly paid warrior enter into a neo-pantheon of gods? While our nation flounders while needing to create millions of jobs, it instead borrows money to fight elective and meaningless wars.  Why is war the only foreign policy we consider?  When did warfare become the American way of life?

Reason and logic had left the building in the RNC.