Christian Leftist

Lou Dobbs has been hitting the crack pipe again.

“Isn’t the church all about saving souls? … We already have enough fools running around with their social programs, social engineering…”

Um, Lou? It’s called SOCIAL JUSTICE. You know — feeding the poor, healing the sick, fighting for the oppressed, like a certain Nazarene carpenter did.

Just because not all of us buy into every piece of jingoistic claptrap that spews from your mouth doesn’t mean that churches apart from the fundamentalist, bigoted, close-minded, gossiping congregations don’t exist.

Just for tonights extra-special hothead diatribe, I’m going to give you a present. Not, it’s not a cookie. It’s your own sub-category. Now whenever you say something stupid, you’ll be able to look it up under ‘national media,’ and it will be right there! Isn’t that special?

In the meantime, please refrain from speculating on people’s motives for believing in God. Mine are clearly not the same as yours. Kthnxbai.

Man, I knew those FreedomWatch ads were horrible, creepy little packs of lies, but I didn’t think that GOP members would see a need to script them personally. Can’t the crazies even write their own propaganda anymore?

The Washington Post is reporting that Democratic Party officials are going to file charges with the Federal Election Commission (note: they also intended to do this against McCain for using public money and then turning the rest of it back to avoid spending caps in the fall). See here:
Democrats Accuse GOP Campaign Arm Of Covertly Writing Ad

The issue here is not that Political Action Committees can’t support party causes, be they the Democratic National Campaign Committee, the Republican National Campaign Committee, or whoever else they so choose, or PACs wouldn’t exist. As DCCC Executive Director Brian Wolff puts it, “Freedom’s Watch is coming to the NRCC’s rescue. The problem is that they’re doing it illegally.”

Larry Craig can’t seem to make up his mind about much of anything these days.

First, he didn’t solicit sex from a police officer. Then, he may have given the wrong impression and merely wanted to plead guilty and sweep the whole dirty affair under the rug. Then, it was in his best interest to shout “I AM NOT GAY!!!” from the rooftops with a 300-lb. bullhorn. A bit later, Craig decided, “I’m sick of this crap. I’ll just quit now while I’m behind. Now, he’s saying he’s not sure, that he wants to fight the accusation made against him but he had planned to not seek re-election BEFORE the scandal broke but he may not quit unless the Ethics Committe finds him guilty of wrongdoing and oh, by the way, his spokesperson says, “There will probably be a new Senator from Idaho come October.”

Guh?

I’m not going to even TRY to tackle this one. Read CNN’s story on the latest about the Larry Craig sex scandal instead, and then blame them for confusing you, not me.

By the way, I think I agree with Arlen Specter on one thing: airport police have far better things that they SHOULD be doing with their time other than waiting for gay men to nudge their boots in restroom stalls.

The AP reports that Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s most popular channel, will be forced off the air at midnight tomorrow because Hugo Chavez’s government has decided not to renew its broadcasting license. Miguel Angel Rodriguez was a talk-show host on Radio Caracas TV until his final segment on Friday, where he vowed, “There is no goodbye. It’s ’see you later.’” Rodriguez had been an active critic of Chavez on the air, and no doubt ol’ Hugo saw the media as a threat to his establishment and changed the laws to suit his own political agenda. Both sides plan street protests over the shutdown during the weekend.

The problem with being either too far to the left or too far to the right is that you end up in essentially the same place – a land of silence. When in college a couple of years ago, I found myself arguing with a real, dyed-in-the-wool Communist about the importance of civil liberties. He shared many social and political ideals with me, yet I argued with him more often and more passionately than I did with pro-war conservatives. He believed ( and probably still does) that freedom of speech is overrated; the first thing he would do if he was in power would be to drag all of the right-wing crazies out into the streets and have them shot. He was only half-joking. His justification for doing so was that allowing the right win a pulpit from which to preach hatred was a threat to the security of the country, and that when you know you’re right, there’s no point in allowing others to create constant turmoil in the political spectrum. I have heard the same type of arguments before; this time only the players and causes were different. My friend’s arguments were decidedly more eloquent than what I have just stated; this is merely my interpretation of his words.

I pointed out that one who is certain s/he is right should embrace criticism, not quash it, and that people have a funny habit of changing their minds, especially when one martyrs the leaders of a cause through persecution. or worse. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. He said the extreme right was no different than he; if Bush and Cheney had anything to do with it, they would probably have locked many of us anti-war activists up long ago. “The reason you are still free,” he said, “is because you are not a significant threat to their power.” It was an astute, if fallible, analysis of majority rule.

[As it turns out, the protests of eleven million people on February 15th, 2003 did not discourage Bush from going to war because, as we now know, Bush and Cheney live in a bubble floating towards the South Pole, last seen heading southeast somewhere over Texas. However, they did convince the rest of the world that if the earth were to take a vote on Iraq, our soldiers never would have left Fort Dix. Despite the unlikelihood of an incumbent 'president's loss in a second-term election, we were enough of a threat that members of the Republican National Committee rented out a comfy ex-bus terminal on Pier 57 to accommodate us during the 2004 Convention sans habeas corpus. The public did not start a revolution upon Bush's re-'election,' either, as I had predicted to my friend. But I digress.]

Only the weak and insecure must fear the birth of conflicting ideas. The more desperate one becomes, the more one tends to suppress one’s opponents by any means necessary, including the hammer of the iron fist. Putin is just as dangerous to the cause of human rights as most neo-cons; he has a nation of citizens who still remember Lenin instead of Stalin, and he has no pesky historical Bill of Rights to stand in the way of his internecine methods of culling his critics from the flocks.

That’s why I’m so pissed off at Danny Glover for actively supporting the Venezuelan president’s cause. Chavez and Bush are two sides of the same coin. All the socialist medicine in the world cannot make up for the loss of basic human freedoms. Bush may be an evil moron, but he is not nearly as adept or as capable at silencing his political foes as others are.

Yet.

So, McClellan resigns. How long did he last again?

I didn’t like him. The press didn’t like him. Of course, the press doesn’t like anybody, so that’s a given. Still, I think he had one of the worst white-collar jobs in the world, so I don’t blame him for moving on to greener pastures.

If Bush really wants to clean house, however, he’s going to have to do a lot better than reshuffling the deck and giving friends the vacant positions. Apparently, he didn’t get the memo.