God the Father, God the Son

America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!
--America the Beautiful (1893)

And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
cause if you really want to hear our views
You haven't done nothin'!
--You Haven't Done Nothin', Stevie Wonder

But these rose colored glasses, that I'm looking through
Show only the beauty, cause they hide all the truth

--Rose-Colored Glasses, John Conlee

Mister Herbert Hoover
Says that now's the time to buy
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie!
--"Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee", Irving Berlin

_____________

Completing the Trinity we go outside the Bush Clan: Michael Chertoff looks like the Holy Ghost, but there are just so many contenders in this administration. We welcome your vote.

A Sunday sermon for our readers, entitled, the Miracle Worker:

George W. Bush has often said that freedom is a gift from God to man. In this fairy tale of his making, God is the manufacturer of a democracy, which all men will accept and revel in. Mr. Bush knows this because he, like Moses, has spoken to God.

In effect, God and His Kingdom have become a democratic ideal that has become a tool in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©). It is a childlike fantasy from a weak individual who envisions himself as a Prophet (Profit?) President.

However, the historical God has not been friendly to the concepts of either democracy or freedom. Certainly, such a high muckety-muck who ordains what his minions shall and shall not do, and what days they must take off, would never give either of those possessions, for that would be to loose anarchy upon the world. He is more like the celestial High Police Commissioner than a proto-Bertrand Russel.

Freedom and democracy have always been wrested from the hands of unwilling leaders, both church and secular. The very concept of God is not a democratic principle, as it demands obeisance to a power hierarchy. If He or She exists, god is omnipotent, omnipresent and immutable, and His actions are not subject to polls or purple thumbs.

Freedom is a hard-won possession in a social construct, and one usually independent of God. God is a limiting concept on human freedom, because if you buy into it, the only freedom you have is what is dispensed to you from on high. He circumscribes your actions, sanctifying or damning them. He does not unleash you from controls, because in that system, you are as a child, and children would do themselves great harm without rules.

Freedom is not free--this is true, because Ranger saw it on a bumper sticker. But if it is not free in America, then why is it a gift to Iraq and Afghanistan? One of the basic tenets of American capitalism is that there are no free lunches. If it is worth having, then it is worth working for. We all possess the ability to actualize our dreams by the sweat of our brow.

So how has George Bush effected the transubstantiation of "freedom" into a god-given "gift"? Any how did he become the FTD man who would deliver this bundle of joy to the ungrateful recipients?

This gift supposedly has devolved from a God that oversaw the decline of the Roman Empire, the rise of the Dark Ages, and intentionally fought the introduction of reason into the political discourse. The same God that now prompts President Bush and his lackeys to deny the validity of the scientific principle of evolution. That God gave man freedom?

You can not give freedom to a people. Freedom cannot be dropped like a cluster bomb. It doesn't arrive signed, sealed, delivered from a drone. One does not peel back the lid from a repressive regime and find freedom lying in the bottom of the tin.

The Pope continually favored the kings of old and defended their divinely ordained right to rule. God, through the church, has supported manifold undemocratic institutions, and to this day remains non-democratic. The Pope retains his "infallible nature," a concept arising from anything but an impulse to freedom. It is dictatorial, sexist and arrogant.

None of the other religions are any better. The early religious sects which migrated to the U.S. did so to escape religious repression, then proceeded to set up repressive societies disallowing religious freedoms to others. The Salem witch trials were democratic versions of The Inquisition.

The first thing the Spaniards did in the New World after stealing all that wasn't nailed down and selecting slaves was to impose their God upon the native population. They were free to do that, so hegemony confers freedom, but only upon those in the power position. The "freedom" they might confer is dilute, by virtue of their ability to dispense it.

Manifest Destiny and the City on the Hill and all the rest of the God-given propaganda sanctioned our imperial expansion and theft of Mexican and Native American lands. We gladly imposed our God upon those heathens, and though through conversion they too could gain God's favor, they were latecomers to the table.

As a result, they could only gain secondary democracy and freedom, which is to say not really freedom at all. They could get God, yes; democracy, no. At least not until the next life. You snooze, you lose.

Somehow Americans have come to accept Mr. Bush's fantasy of the feasibility of forcefully exported freedom and democracy. Moreover, they call it a virtue. But if this freedom is free, why are the American taxpayers footing a $3 trillion debt for this divine intervention?

Why do Americans accept such fantastical leadership? It would be acceptable if Bush were multiplying the loaves and fishes while the American public struggles to meet their exponentially rising grocery bills.

George Bush doesn't believe in evolution, but his God seems to have evolved from a tyrant to a benevolent custodian of free peoples inhabiting democracies.

This is not so much evolution, but a collective delusion; the result of living in a closed system called Fantasyland, under the dogma of your choice.

--Jim and Lisa

Variable Equation

Toad saw that he was trapped. They understood him,
they saw through him, they had got ahead of him.
His pleasant dream was shattered.
--The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

It's long past time for the President to be honest
with the American people:
Under what circumstances could our troops come home?
Under what scenario could this war end?
--Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
________________

George Bush is fond of reciting the litany: he -- or at least the people he has placed in harm's way -- will not leave Iraq until he has achieved victory. But the U.S. will never win an insurgency because we are on the wrong side of the equation.

The issues pertinent to winning an insurgency are different than those that allow a pro ball team achieve a winning season. They outstretch a balance sheet that leads a corporation to prosper. Insurgencies are not readily quantifiable, unlike classic wars or business ventures or ball clubs. All of the latter are guided by cost/benefit analysis. Not only, "Can we kill the enemy," but, "Can we afford to kill them?"

Even with "victory," a country may founder. The British empire won WWI and WWII, but the empire did not prosper. Wars must benefit the country or they should not be fought. Why fight and expend treasure for no beneficial return?

For this reason the concept of frivolous (elective/preemptive) war defies reason. The war in Iraq is this type of war. No nation enters a war with the idea of losing, but who precisely is winning, and what are they winning? What are we to achieve in Iraq?

The insurgents are not fighting for profit. They will not stop when the cost/benefit ratio becomes unfavorable to them, because that is not their motivator.

We will not win, because ultimately we cannot afford to win; we are on the business model. As with Bear Stearns, there will be an intervention and a bailout when things get too dire, even if stocks go at $2 a share. They, however, can not afford to lose. They are on the right side of the equation for winning this insurgency.

Five years and several lynchings later, Iraq is anything but stable or democratic. Democracy = instability in Iraq. Democracy will never equal stability in Iraq. Stability will only be achieved via harsh, suppressive measures, which are not hallmarks of democracy.

The pundits are fond of saying that Iraq is complex, but Iraq is simplicity itself. The complexity is introduced because the U.S. cannot define what we are are, what our goals are and what Iraq should be. And we are using our metrics, which may not be the same measurements used by the Iraqis.

Saddam Hussein was also a simple quantity: a dictator controlling the diverse and hostile population of a make-believe country. The U.S. threw him out and has proceeded to reprise Saddam's role by trying to force the Iraqi people into a compliance.

The U.S.'s problem is they lack Saddam's legitimacy, who was of and by Iraq. A bad man, but at least he was their bad man. We will never get a compliance because we are on the wrong side of things. The right side to achieve that goal is to be a harsh overlord, but that contradicts our claim that we are there to outlaw that sort of thing.

The U.S. is hypocritical and will not gain success because we lack unity and consistency. The U.S. doesn't know what it is anymore.

The Bush administration has compromised the nation's integrity. The image that comes to mind is that of a man sinking in quicksand, barking orders to everyone else, who may or may not also be sinking. The U.S. is forcing its world view on Iraq, without holding a clear definition of that view. Now, that is complex. More to the point, confused.

The U.S. mission is impossible to reconcile; we cannot prove them wrong because we cannot prove ourselves right. Be free the way we want you to be free, but that freedom is an ever-changing quantity. At home, those vaunted freedoms are ever receding and being redefined. What is it we seek to export? U.S. democracy ala 1989? 2006, post-Yoo?

There is a cosmic joke hidden somewhere in this phony war. The Iraqi people do not need America in their lives or future. They are independent due to their oil reserves. However, the U.S. does need the Iraqi oil.

Balance that equation.

We the People

Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies
--Little Lies, Fleetwood Mac

Lies lies
Thats all I ever get from you
--Lies, Styx

There's deceivers an' believers an' old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go
--Hands on the Wheel, Willie Nelson
___________

In yesterday's State of the (dis)Union address, George W. Bush emphasized numerous times the concept that the American people should be trusted. This hogwash doesn't square with the way Mr. President has treated corpus Americanus. In today's America it is not We the People, it is them, and us.

If the government trusts us so much, then why so many Federal laws to keep us in line? In fact, why not make the Federal income Tax voluntary if we are so trusted? It seems that trust is only useful as an applause line. If it is "We the People," let us plug in a few rejoinders of our own:

1. We the People are tired of these phony wars. End them now.
2. We the People are tired of warrantless intrusions into our private lives.
3. We the People are tired of a politics of divisiveness.
4. We the People are tired of national policy that claims to be fiscally conservative, yet squanders money prodigiously.
5. We the People are tired of secret courts, secret police, secret prisons, secret interrogation techniques and secret White House visitor logs.
6. We the People are tired of weekly escalating grocery bills and medical costs.
7. We the People are tired of daily increases in the cost of petroleum products.
8. We the People want a government free of liturgical entanglements.

No, this is not currently a government of, by and for the People. That is a lie. The only thing the "We the People" get is socked by taxes and the chance to vote to sustain a deceit called "democracy." That is the State of the Union, 2008-style.

We the People are pissed.