There appears to be a great deal of irrelevant debate over whether Bush believes God personally told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House says that the claims made in an upcoming BBC documentary that Bush told the then Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, that God told him to end the tyranny in Iraq are absurd. Although the White House has been quick to deny that the reborn George ever made the statements, they haven't answered the question of whether Bush believes its true.
As frightening as the notion that Bush thinks he speaks directly to the almighty may be, I have to question whether this is really a revelation. Bush certainly has made his devotion to Christ well-known and has claimed before that his actions are based primarily on his faith. Certainly no one questions whether Bush is an ostensibly religious man, although his motives to be so are certainly debatable. I absolutely love dilemmas such as this though, because it puts moderate Christians in a very awkward position. They are forced to pretend that Bush is speaking metaphorically when he truly isn't and, in fact, often can't due to an inability to grasp the concept and because metaphors make his brain hurt.
However, is it really any more insane to believe that God would ask our current slow-witted President to invade some country than to think he debated Abraham the pros and cons of infanticide or sent an Israeli snake-oil salesman (which may or may not have been himself or his son or both - that eternally unsatisfactory Athanasian solution) to wander around Judea and Samaria with his desertbilly entourage or that he actually gives a shit whether you use his name in vain and yet neglected to explain when and what that entailed? If God was communicating through the heavens to us lowly mortals, as true Christians must certainly believe he at least a few times did, why wouldn't he talk to George W. Bush? In fact, to the world's everlasting shame and Jesus' cringing embarrassment, Bush is probably the number one pseudo-Christian in the world that God would speak to if he were so inclined to tortuous conversations, if only because Bush is currently the most powerful man on earth and what not.
In addition, it would be strangely naive to assume God, at least the version to be found in the old testament, would not counsel our mad George in support of imperialistic wars of aggression. He has always had a fondness for them in the past, as they continually help to line the pews of his congregations and of coarse make begrudging converts of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves inside a foxhole - at least if the cliches of so many armchair warriors are to be taken as true.
But let us assume that the big G did not tell Bush to invade anyone. So what? Someone obviously did, lest it was simply an unfortunate coincidence that virtually every known neoconservative championing the Iraq invasion over the last decade somehow found foreign policy positions in this Administration. If I had to guess, I would say that someone just led Bush into an empty room in the west wing with a trail of Cocoa-puffs and that old prankster Richard Pearle, hiding in the closet, did his best "God-voice" through the White House PA system and was all like "Dubya, why don't you invade, that means attack, Iraq in March, it's the country that's just like Iran, but with more oil...ah, just ask Dick to show it to you on a map. Anyways, you should invade them in the name of peace and justice because contradiction is good politics, Saddam tried to kill your Dad and because I want you to….ooohh....ahhhh. Oh, and do this and I will forget all about that dead hooker incident." George: "you know about that?" God (winking): "Know about what George?" Bush: "Uh, that thing you just mentioned about the hooker.." God: "Yeah, no, I know, I was showing you how I forgot about...oh never mind."
Plus, even if George can hide behind the asininity of a divine mandate, what's Congress' excuse? Did the Senate and House hold a conference call with God before they all voted in favor of the Iraq war resolution? I don't particularly care who the giant asshole, metaphysical or not, telling the idiots in Washington how to most swiftly ruin the world, I just want them to stop listening. The problem is God is a notoriously unpredictable bastard and he absolutely loves fucking with people. You have to treat him like so many war-praising, jingoistic, thoughtless media pundits who love so dearly to hear their own voices in the service of faux-patriotism, you just have to tune him out.
"Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and belched and coughed,
And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering
Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."
[William Blake]
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Monday, October 3, 2005
Here Your It Miers - Bush Nominates Crazy-Ass White Lady to Supreme Court
What the fuck is the White House up to now? Harriet "Seriously, Where the Hell Did I Come From" Miers nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States? Oliver Wendell Holmes just literally rolled over - very slowly mind you - in his separate but equal grave. As orgasmically satisfying as it is to watch conservatives throw Napoleonic tantrums all day about this nomination, I just cannot believe that the Bush administration has miscalculated their base's response so badly. Something is decidedly amiss in DC and it smells a lot like Karl Rove's creamy, hairless ass, which, incidentally, smells a lot like a rat. This absolutely has to be some kind of evil genius ploy. How else to explain such an inexplicable nomination, one that pleases neither conservatives nor liberals, nor any other pleasable or identifiable political faction for that matter - other than Harry Reid (who is acting freakishly like Miers is his grandmother) and "The Texas League of Single Old White Ladies for Essentially No Independent Political Agenda in America" of course, who are claiming this as a huge victory for "perplexing non-eventism." Hell, even moderates can't figure where the high and mighty middle ground is yet. Who is this old woman we are all asking ourselves? Other than an uncomfortable love for black eyeliner and gaudy Church attire, what are her passions?
She appears to be everything that John G. Roberts was not, unqualified, unknown and unpredictable. Roberts was an ideal pick for the White House because his legal record and resume was unassailable. He certainly had an impressive amount of trial experience with the Supreme Court, even if almost always on the wrong side, and he could reliably fall back on the "just representing my client" card for any unsavory bits of rightwing craziness he may have said in the past. Even if Roberts was presented with a memo in which he stated that black people had smaller brains than whites or that torturing gays can be good training exercises for our soldiers when not at war, he could simply deflect those political asteroids towards his then client, Ronald Reagan, where they would be immediately burned up in Reagan's flaming helio-atmospheric aura of political invincibility. Having watched most of the confirmation hearings, even I found Roberts frustratingly likeable. His mildly disturbing conservative ideology and handsy cub-scout-troop-leader creepiness was overshadowed by his ultra nice-guy reasonableness and his finely polished Harvardian uber-competence. With his round, overly-attentive, tumescent-eyed face, his mellifluous Midwesterny Christianiness, he had the look of a newborn Republican baby just squeezed out of the dusty, hateful womb of Barbara Bush to gasp in fright at the nefarious and multi-ethnic world for the very first time. Roberts face radiated a preternatural innocence like some innate Darwinistic defense mechanism to ward off the bloodthirsty fangs of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee from his exposed jugular. At one point during the hearings I am pretty sure that Chuck Schumer wanted to jump over the dais and hug the shit out of Roberts and somehow try to re-civilize him as if he were a newly found wolf-child - "Come on John, you are a smart guy, you can see how fucked up it is to force poverty-stricken women to have babies they can't raise, can't you? Johnny, admit it, NASCAR sucks doesn't it?" Most importantly though, Roberts really did know constitutional law backwards and forwards, mostly backwards, whether or not he gave a fuck about those it affected.
Miers, on the other hand, has no judicial experience to look to and so it seems very few statements to illuminate her potential judicial philosophy on the bench. Her most controversial statement to date, as if in an effort to preemptively disclaim any intelligence of her own, that she considers George W. Bush to be the most brilliant man she has ever met! Oh yes, suddenly freaked-out reader, she was talking the same George W. Bush that's currently our President. Extreme loyalty to George W. Bush is scary enough on principle, but this country is in some truly deep shit if Miers has to call Dubya at the ranch in the middle of one of his famous digging in the dirt sessions to get his thoughts on a constitutional question of law before ruling. But, I think here is where we find the real answer to this nomination. I believe this nomination is a very specific reaction to the great Sandra Day O'Connor debacle of 1981. O'Connor, a relatively conservative judicial figure nominated by Reagan, back-fired on the right because eventually she decided that her commitment to her job and her own ideology overpowered her loyalty to her benefactors. The best way to avoid a similar incident, nominate a deeply entrenched political crony who is completely unqualified for the post and, consequently, passionately devoted to you and your agenda - someone lacking any political inclinations of their own. My bet is that the young Brooks Brothers boys in the West Wing are frantically calling every wingnut in the beltway right now to assure them that Miers has explicit instructions to vote in all matters with Justice Scalia. The right already has the ideology they want on the Court, now what they need is a little lubrication. They need another yes-man, or yes-woman as it were. Clarence "Pubes" Thomas is already up there to give some desperately-needed African-American mojo to their cause, Roberts has just given them some intellectual and constitutional credibility, now Bush has added the last piece to the puzzle, some pseudo-women's-rights credibility wrapped up in a five foot two public relations package, but more importantly, a guaranteed fifth vote. They have essentially just taken the swing out of the swing vote.
The problem though is that the conservative punditry wants a controversial ideologue more than it really wants an additional vote, as that's the only way we get to the impending culture war they have been so endlessly pining for. They want to watch the left squirm a bit. Nobody likes to catch a dead fish, you want a little fight to make it worthwhile. At some point though, I think they will, reluctantly, get on the same page as the Administration on this one. They still have a long confirmation process to talk about assless-pantsed homos leering at their children and the ACLU's infamous Sunday night fetus-death cocktail parties. The Democrats best bet, of course, would be to attack Miers on her glaring lack of qualifications for the job, something difficult for the Republicans to counter since it became the keystone theme of Roberts' confirmation. However, they will be wary of doing so for fear that, if they do in fact court-block Miers, the White House will put up a much more gratuitously rightwing nominee in response. But I think they need to be careful of getting too excited about the negative response of Republicans. Although almost always true, just because Rush Limbaugh is against something doesn't make it righteous. I just can't buy the notion that George Bush is cowering to the political pressure from the left to avoid a fight. After Iraq, tax cuts, stem-cells, Plamegate, Katrina, does it seem credulous to anyone that Bush in his final term is really scared of pissing off liberals? The angle isn't completely clear here yet, but its there somewhere, hiding underneath Miers' purple, pleated Gospel gear. Maybe its nothing more complicated than Bush rewarding someone for having the gargantuan balls to call him brilliant in public.
She appears to be everything that John G. Roberts was not, unqualified, unknown and unpredictable. Roberts was an ideal pick for the White House because his legal record and resume was unassailable. He certainly had an impressive amount of trial experience with the Supreme Court, even if almost always on the wrong side, and he could reliably fall back on the "just representing my client" card for any unsavory bits of rightwing craziness he may have said in the past. Even if Roberts was presented with a memo in which he stated that black people had smaller brains than whites or that torturing gays can be good training exercises for our soldiers when not at war, he could simply deflect those political asteroids towards his then client, Ronald Reagan, where they would be immediately burned up in Reagan's flaming helio-atmospheric aura of political invincibility. Having watched most of the confirmation hearings, even I found Roberts frustratingly likeable. His mildly disturbing conservative ideology and handsy cub-scout-troop-leader creepiness was overshadowed by his ultra nice-guy reasonableness and his finely polished Harvardian uber-competence. With his round, overly-attentive, tumescent-eyed face, his mellifluous Midwesterny Christianiness, he had the look of a newborn Republican baby just squeezed out of the dusty, hateful womb of Barbara Bush to gasp in fright at the nefarious and multi-ethnic world for the very first time. Roberts face radiated a preternatural innocence like some innate Darwinistic defense mechanism to ward off the bloodthirsty fangs of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee from his exposed jugular. At one point during the hearings I am pretty sure that Chuck Schumer wanted to jump over the dais and hug the shit out of Roberts and somehow try to re-civilize him as if he were a newly found wolf-child - "Come on John, you are a smart guy, you can see how fucked up it is to force poverty-stricken women to have babies they can't raise, can't you? Johnny, admit it, NASCAR sucks doesn't it?" Most importantly though, Roberts really did know constitutional law backwards and forwards, mostly backwards, whether or not he gave a fuck about those it affected.
Miers, on the other hand, has no judicial experience to look to and so it seems very few statements to illuminate her potential judicial philosophy on the bench. Her most controversial statement to date, as if in an effort to preemptively disclaim any intelligence of her own, that she considers George W. Bush to be the most brilliant man she has ever met! Oh yes, suddenly freaked-out reader, she was talking the same George W. Bush that's currently our President. Extreme loyalty to George W. Bush is scary enough on principle, but this country is in some truly deep shit if Miers has to call Dubya at the ranch in the middle of one of his famous digging in the dirt sessions to get his thoughts on a constitutional question of law before ruling. But, I think here is where we find the real answer to this nomination. I believe this nomination is a very specific reaction to the great Sandra Day O'Connor debacle of 1981. O'Connor, a relatively conservative judicial figure nominated by Reagan, back-fired on the right because eventually she decided that her commitment to her job and her own ideology overpowered her loyalty to her benefactors. The best way to avoid a similar incident, nominate a deeply entrenched political crony who is completely unqualified for the post and, consequently, passionately devoted to you and your agenda - someone lacking any political inclinations of their own. My bet is that the young Brooks Brothers boys in the West Wing are frantically calling every wingnut in the beltway right now to assure them that Miers has explicit instructions to vote in all matters with Justice Scalia. The right already has the ideology they want on the Court, now what they need is a little lubrication. They need another yes-man, or yes-woman as it were. Clarence "Pubes" Thomas is already up there to give some desperately-needed African-American mojo to their cause, Roberts has just given them some intellectual and constitutional credibility, now Bush has added the last piece to the puzzle, some pseudo-women's-rights credibility wrapped up in a five foot two public relations package, but more importantly, a guaranteed fifth vote. They have essentially just taken the swing out of the swing vote.
The problem though is that the conservative punditry wants a controversial ideologue more than it really wants an additional vote, as that's the only way we get to the impending culture war they have been so endlessly pining for. They want to watch the left squirm a bit. Nobody likes to catch a dead fish, you want a little fight to make it worthwhile. At some point though, I think they will, reluctantly, get on the same page as the Administration on this one. They still have a long confirmation process to talk about assless-pantsed homos leering at their children and the ACLU's infamous Sunday night fetus-death cocktail parties. The Democrats best bet, of course, would be to attack Miers on her glaring lack of qualifications for the job, something difficult for the Republicans to counter since it became the keystone theme of Roberts' confirmation. However, they will be wary of doing so for fear that, if they do in fact court-block Miers, the White House will put up a much more gratuitously rightwing nominee in response. But I think they need to be careful of getting too excited about the negative response of Republicans. Although almost always true, just because Rush Limbaugh is against something doesn't make it righteous. I just can't buy the notion that George Bush is cowering to the political pressure from the left to avoid a fight. After Iraq, tax cuts, stem-cells, Plamegate, Katrina, does it seem credulous to anyone that Bush in his final term is really scared of pissing off liberals? The angle isn't completely clear here yet, but its there somewhere, hiding underneath Miers' purple, pleated Gospel gear. Maybe its nothing more complicated than Bush rewarding someone for having the gargantuan balls to call him brilliant in public.
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