Author: phronesis

Forgive me in advance for violating all sorts of bloggeration rules.  I’m kind of copying my own comment to stormbear’s Olbermann diary because I’m fucking depressed.  

This is a big WTF moment for Pelosi and Reid.  I just wonder if they stuck their respective heads up their own ass, or if they stuck their heads up one another’s.  Cuz these two are in the fucking dark.

Why in the hell couldn’t they bring themselves to pronounce with every breath that the Congress, representing the American people, is fully funding the troops, and that it’s the stubborn, childish, idiotic Liar-in-Chief who is willing to not fund the troops with his threatened veto?  And during the debate to overturn the veto to proclaim that it is the Republicans slavishly following their deiscredited President who are putting our troops at risk by not overturning said veto.  

I don’t know of one rational human being who believes anything the current occupier of the White House says. Now, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to turn up one human being who will even volunteer to help Reid and Pelosi track down their spines.  

I didn’t know one could blink with one’s head up one’s ass.  But these two wusses just did.

Do you think our dynamic duo could wrench their heads out of whence they placed them to explain themselves on Booman Tribune? Yeah right.  If they don’t have the courage of a conviction they wouldn’t even have the courage of dispatching an intern to take the heat here.

Alexander Cockburn has a passage from his Rumsfeld book posted on Counter Punch.  The Counter Punch positng outlines Rumsfleds attempts to change the military.  Enamored by some Air Force types who continue to believe that a country can be  bombed into submission, Rumsfeld embraced the notion of “jointness” which in practice meant to Rummy and his sycophants in DoD and the Pentagon that they would be able to predict the future.  In doing so they forgot the universal truth of war; that plans look complete only until the first shot is fired.

In plain English, they believed that it was possible not only to know everything about the other side’s society in all its ramifications and connections, but also to forecast the enemy’s reaction to any action against any component of that society, and how that would affect all the other components.

This, in itself, is complete and utter hubris.  What is more damaging is how Rumsfled and his cronies would not allow reality to upset their arrogant self-satisfaction.  An exercise called Millenium Challenge 2002 was dreamt up to show how well this new approach was going to work.  In actuality what happened illuminates the Stalinistic approach to reality that defines the Bush Administration in every one of its endeavors.  

Toward the end of the following July, Rumsfeld made a special trip down to Suffolk. He was there to survey preparations for Millennium Challenge 2002, an enormously elaborate war game that its designers ­ the JFCOM commanders ­ confidently expected would fully vindicate the arcane theology of EBO, RDO, ONA and PMESII that they preached so enthusiastically. It would also give Rumsfeld something to show, as he said during his visit, “the progress that we have made this far in transforming to produce the combat capability necessary to meet deep threats and the challenges of the 21st Century”. Viewing the arrays of computer terminals and esoteric communications equipment, he may well have been reminded of happy times in the COG exercises, waging nuclear war. (COG is the acronym for Continuity of Government, a top secret series of exercises to test the ability of the government to continue to function during and after a nuclear attack.

What actually happened in Millenium Challenge was a preview of the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld catastrophe in Iraq.  A true American General Paul Van Riper was the leader of the American enemy in this war game.  This is a long passage, but it perfectly described the arrogance and denial of reality that is the soul of the destroyers of our Republic Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld.

In the scenario designed by the exercise planners, Van Riper was playing the role of a rogue military commander somewhere in the Persian Gulf who was willfully confronting the United States. Though there were more than 13,000 troops, as well as planes and ships taking part in the game across the country, much of the action was to occur in computers and be displayed on monitors, the ultimate video game. Thanks to their enormous operational net assessment databases, the Blue Team thought they knew all they needed to know about their enemy, and how he would behave. But they were wrong. For a start, they did not know what he looked like. The Blue commander, a three-star Army general, worked in full uniform, surrounded by his extensive staff. Van Riper, dressed in casual civilian clothes, took a stroll, unrecognized, through the Blue Team headquarters area to get the measure of his opponent. With his own staff, he was informal, though he forbade the use of acronyms. “We’ll all speak English here,” he told them.

In the first hours of the war, the Blue Team knocked out Van Riper’s fiber-optic communications, confidently expecting that he would now be forced to use radio links that could be easily intercepted. He refused to cooperate, quickly turning to motorcycle couriers and coded messages in the calls to prayer from the mosques in preparing his own attack. He was no longer performing an assigned part in a scripted play; Van Riper had become a real, bloody-minded, Middle Eastern enemy who had no intention of playing by the rules and was determined to win.

Just a month earlier, the Bush administration had announced a new national security policy of pre-emptive attacks “in exercising our inherent right of self-defense”. So, when a Blue Team carrier task force loaded with troops steamed into the Gulf (at least on the computer simulation) and took up station off the coast of his territory, Van Riper assumed that they were going to follow the new policy and attack him without warning. “I decided to pre-empt the pre-empter,” he recalled later with satisfaction. Oddly enough, the Blue general sensed this, saying, “I have a feeling that Red is going to strike,” but his staff was quick to assure him that their ONA made it clear that this could not happen.

Van Riper was well aware of the U.S. Navy’s “Aegis” anti-missile capabilities, and how many missiles it would take to overwhelm them. “Usually Red hoards its missiles, letting them out in dribs and drabs”, he told me in retracing the battle. “That’s foolish, I did a salvo launch, used up pretty much all my inventory at once.” The defenses were overwhelmed. Sixteen American ships sank to the bottom of the Gulf, along with twenty thousand servicemen. Only a few days in, the war was over, and the “transformed” military had been beaten hands down.

So how did the politicians who are now whining that we must listen to the military and not “micro-manage” the war effort do?  They changed the rules of the game, rigged it to make it look like their new transformed military of fantasy would win.  In other words, they acted like petty dictators living in a world of of the mind of their own creation.

Van Riper was informed that the sunken ships had magically re-floated themselves, the dead had come back to life, and the war was on again. But this time there would be no surprises. He was not allowed to shoot down Blue Team V-22 troop transports, though these are highly vulnerable planes. The Red Team was ordered to switch on their radars so that they could be more easily destroyed. The umpires announced that his missile strikes had been intercepted. In short, the game was now unashamedly rigged to ensure that the U.S. won and all the new theories proven correct. Van Riper resigned as Red leader, but stayed on to monitor the predictable rout of his forces under these new conditions. Afterwards he wrote a scathing report, documenting how the exercise had been rigged and by whom , but no outsider could read it because it was classified secret. Asked when Van Riper’s report would be declassified and released, an embarrassed Gen. Kerner said that it would remain under wraps “until I’ve had a chance to brief my boss”.

His boss, of course, was Donald Rumsfeld, who showed no interest in the report, still less of releasing it to the public.

And these idiots don’t understand why no one believes a word they say.

Another American corporation pays its CEO millions while screwing their employees.

This short story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune is the perfect particular story that illuminates a universal truth about American corporatism and its incredible anti-American values.

http://www.startribune.com/535/story/1192801.html

How do these people sleep at night, look in the mirror and explain how in any way, shape, or form, they are not the moral equivalent of Paris Hilton?

Qwest says the reduced benefits for retirees have been made necessary by the increased costs it faces. But the contrast between the treatment afforded the CEO and the rank and file isn’t limited to Qwest.

Top executives are being paid 262 times the average worker’s wage, up from a multiple of 24 about 40 years ago, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s most recent analysis in 2005. The gap widened significantly in the 1990s, in part because of the generous use of stock options in executive pay packages.

And these are the fuckers that tell us that business can do the job better than government.  These are the fuckers whose welfare our current govenment defines as its purpose.  This is why Hugo Chavez is on the right track.  This is why the culture of Las Vegas is more authentic than that of the corporate board room.

Dick Cheney is claiming that he is immune from the civil lawsuit brought by Valerie Plame and her husband Joseph Wilson for the damage done to Plame and Wilson through the illegal revealing of her covert CIA status.

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune,

Attorneys for Cheney and the other officials said any conversations they had about Plame with one another and reporters were part of their normal job duties because they were discussing foreign policy and engaging in an appropriate “policy dispute.” Cheney’s attorney went further, arguing that Cheney is legally akin to the president because of his unique government role, and has absolute immunity from any lawsuit.

Aside from the fact that constitutionally Cheney is not akin to the President (even though existentially Bush is Cheney’s fluffer) Cheney’s argument should be repudiated by the Supreme Court.  Yeah right.  This is the Supreme Court that ruled that President Clinton was not immune from a civil suit brought by Paula Jones, and that said suit would not really hinder his ability to do his job as President.  That was a load of crap then, and it continues to be a load of crap now.  But is not this idiotic ruling still precedent? Would not a Supreme Court filled with 9 honest judges rule that, like the Jones suit, the Plame suit should be allowed to go forward because it will not unduly hinder the Vice President’s only job of daily inquiring as to the health of the President?

Of course, the real purpose of the Paula Jones suit funded by Scaife and other lunatic right wingnuts was to precisely hinder the job performance and public perception of President Clinton.  This was politics by lawsuit.  

In the Plame suit, Valerie Plame  suffered actual financial damages (she lost her job) and considerable emotional damages arising out of the loss of her CIA cover.  Since she was working on non-proliferation, I’m certain her life was and continues to be in danger.  

Erwin Chemerinsky, a Duke University law professor who represents Wilson and Plame, said the leak was no typical policy debate. He said that after Plame’s CIA cover was blown the couple feared for their safety and their children’s safety, and Plame lost any opportunity for advancement at the CIA.

This lawsuit should be allowed to proceed now rather than wait until Cheney is out of office because of the precedent of the Jones suit.  That the Supreme Court may rule in Cheney’s favor should open some of those justices to impeachment charges for such a blatantly political ruling.  Added to the Court’s blatant theft of the 2000 Presidential election, such a ruling would completely destroy the Courts position as a co-equal non-political function of the federal government.

This issue could become a watershed moment for impeachment.  It will reveal how the Republican Party has sacrificed all governmental functions like providing for the common defense and instituting justice on the altar of their own obsession with power.  

http://www.startribune.com/484/story/1191142.html

John McCain is droning on about staying in Iraq and as usual Tim Russert can only lob slow pitch softball  questions.  

Let’s assume McCain is an honorable guy with well thought views held with principle: in other words that he is different from Bush, Cheney and their kindergarten admininstration’s foreign policy by fairy tale.

He is still wrong.  His only schtick is that if we fail in Iraq that “al Qaeda will follow us home”.  
That is not a strategy for success in Iraq.  And it is not even true.  al Qaeda is already in the United States.  All of our intelligence services say this.  They are here because the Bush Administration has done nothing to fight al Qaeda and squandered our military in Iraq.  McCain would continue the lunacy.  Defeating terrorism is not simply a military exercise, it is a diplomatic and intelligence and criminal prosecution excercise.  Squandering American lives and dollars in Iraq does not make us safer, it makes us weaker and more vulnerable because we are not fighting the people who attacked us.  

McCain also continues to misrepresent the Democratic position on setting a time certain for American troops being taken out of the cross hairs in Baghdad.  The so-called time table for withdrawal is an actual strategy that would force the Iraqis to take some responsibility for their own security, and free up our military to concentrate on actual threats to our country.  The violence in Iraq is not fueled by al Qaeda but by the same kind of religious hatred that infected Northern Ireland and the Balkans.  Religious wars are not won by an occupation.  

No matter how he tries to put lipstick on Bush’s pig, McCain has absolutely nothing different to offer than the failed, incompetent policy brought to us by the infants currently in the White House.  

The rest of the hour demonstrated that McCain is simply another politician on the right with no vision, no ability to see past the next election, and nothing to offer our country.

In the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Columnist Nick Coleman has written articles about the resignation of one U.S Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger and his replacement by hand picked “Bushie” Rachel Paulose.

The columns were written after the simultaneous resignations of the top four managing prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office.  All the resigning prosecutors cited Paulose’s unprofessional conduct, incompetence and that familiar arrogance of ignorance that infects Bush and the lackeys and cronies he appoints to important federal offices.

Paulose was picked by Gonzales to replace former U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger, a mainstream Republican who resigned unexpectedly, possibly just evading the ax (circumstances suggest that his name was on the original “hit list” of attorneys targeted for replacement, as I explained last week). At the time she was picked, Paulose was an aide to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who has admitted giving false testimony to Congress about “Purge-gate,” the scandal over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

Paulose worked with those involved in “Purge-gate” at the time the plans were hatched. KSTP reported that Monica Goodling, who resigned Friday as the White House liaison for the Department of Justice, was supposed to have been a part of Paulose’s semi-regal investiture ceremony at the University of St. Thomas law school. But Goodling stayed away. Later, she invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to appear before a Senate committee.

This is the heart of the matter.  Coleman connects Paulose’s appointment to the firing of eight U.S. Attorney’s and their replacement by Gonzales under the bullshit provision of the Patriot Act that avoided the constitutional requirement of obtaining Senate approval.  Her appointment

* Was part of an effort to transform the ranks of prosecutors by appointing partisan loyalists with close ties to Gonzales and the White House;

* May be connected to a political strategy by President George W. Bush’s adviser Karl Rove, who has targeted alleged Democratic voter fraud for prosecution. In a talk to the Republican National Lawyers Association, Rove said 11 states (including Minnesota) will be crucial in the 2008 election. Nine, including Minnesota, have had new attorneys appointed.

I take issue with Coleman giving anyone in this corrupt, fascist adminstration the benefit of the doubt by using the word “may” when referring to Rove’s complete undermining of the offices of U.S. Attorneys.
Especially since he goes on to say:

that Paulose is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, a tight-knit group of Republican and Libertarian lawyers driven by an ideological determination to remake the court system in their image. Paulose has not responded to media queries about her membership in the society. A spokesperson said last week that she didn’t think Paulose belonged, but would ask; no answer was forthcoming. Paulose’s own résumé, however, states that she has been a member since 2001.

Thank God this corrupt, fascist administration is also incompetent.  As Coleman says,

A U.S. attorney who is too inexperienced to lead a major prosecutor’s office and whose managerial incompetence has provoked a meltdown was appointed by the highest powers in the land for naked political reasons. Her appointment may not survive the scrutiny it deserves and now will get.

As good as Coleman’s column is, he doesn’t go far enough.  This is just another piece in the corrupt, fascist attempt by the Bush Administation and the Republican Party to completely undermine American society as we know it and to turn it into a dominionist wet dream.  Rove has identified 11 crucial states for the 2008 election.  He has replaced the U.S. Attorneys in nine of those eleven states (including Paulose).  Rove will add trumped up Democratic voter fraud charges brought by his puppet U.S. Attorneys to his time tested voter dis-enfranchisement and voter suppression efforts put to such successful use in 2000 and 2004.  

This is beyond the worst corruption of the Nixon Adminstration.  This is stuff of impeachment, and then the stuff of federal prosecution.  Will there be any  U.S. Attorneys left still bound by their oath of office?

Here’s Coleman’s columns.
http://www.startribune.com/357/story/1105905.html
http://www.startribune.com/357/story/1092041.html

I just read Booman’s bloggerazzi diary and the long string of comments.  I fear something is happening here and what it is may be very destructive of what I once found here.  And it is symtomatic of what is wrong with America.

Here’s something I wrote in Booman last June.

Re: Censorship and Dkos (none / 0)
I want to do two things in this comment.  Suck up to Booman and offer an idea about the “censorship” on DKos.  
First: sucking up.  I started out in the blogosphere as someone making comments and writing pretty much unread diaries on Dkos.  It was fun to read the few comments about my diaries, and to make comments on other diaries.  I discovered the frog pond through DKos and so I started doing the same thing here: writing and reading diaries and comments.  And then something wonderful happened, I started to see and feel an actual sense of community in the frog pond.  People could still be obtuse or off-putting or out in left field (and so could I) but there was and is a sense on Booman that whatever it is that keeps us participating here is more important that the opinions we express.

Perhaps all of us should keep in mind that human beings are much more than their political opinions, and while political opinions are very important because they have consequences, they are only a small part of who we all are.  What we share as human beings who experience reality is far broader than our opinions.  I think when we forget this, we end up with the kind of crap described in Booman’s diary and that has also happened to too many others.  

Is it naive to want to have a forum where opinions are vehemently expressed and defended but where we respect one anothers’ experiences and shared humanity?  Is it too “preachy” to even say this?

On the other hand, I actually don’t give a shit about the personal stuff of people who write and comment here.  One of the great attributes of this blog is the opportunity to write and comment and stay focused on what we think about what we should do.  So I get a little  bewildered with the vituperation.  Maybe it’s because I’ve never met any of the rest of this collection of frogs in person.  Maybe it’s because I don’t do this for a living.  But for whatever reason, I think I will miss what was once here.  Can we get it back? Don’t know.

My first impression of Dubya was, still is, and probably will always continue to be that he is so fucking stupid and ideologically driven that he has in the past, continues now, and will continue in the future to fuck up America’s standing in the world and to existentially put us at risk.  But what if he is doing it on purpose.

The ties between the Saudi royal family and the Bush family are well documented and we even have tape of  Dubya’s hand-holding walks with some of his desert princes.  And so, despite our national interest to find a solution to the Bush created fiasco in Iraq, Bush and Cheney are now rattling the sabres they both refused to pick up in their youth and pointing them at Iran.   Any rational human must ask, “what the fuck?”

Who benefits?  Only one country benefits from the increasing tension between the U.S. and Iran, and that is the Bush-puppet-master kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  I used to think that if Bush was talking, we had to look to make sure we could see both of Cheney’s hands, thereby assuring that one of them was not up Bush’s ass a’ la Howdy Doody.  Now I think the hands we need to locationally verify are coming out of a Saudi robe.

So what are the facts that would lead me to think that either our President Bush likes a hand up his ass or that he is a puppet of the Saudis.  And no, I’m not going to make a crack about the press credentials of one “male escort” making all sorts of visits to the White House.

1.  The United States is attacked by 19 al Qaeda terrorists, 15 of which are Saudi citizens.  Bush responds by putting the invasion of Iraq into motion almost immediately after this attack.  And by letting members of the bin Laden family fly out of the country when all other domesitc flights are grounded.  Hmmm, what neighboring country had the most to fear from Iraq and has princes that like to hold hands with our President?
2.  In order to go after the Afghan bases of the terrorists who attacked us on the cheap, Bush converts Pakistan from terrorist state to ally.  When Islamic terrorists get nuclear material, the most likely source will be this Bush ally, not Iran.
3.  Once Bush completely screwed the pooch in Iraq by not listening to our competent military leaders’ assessments on required troop levels and by having absolutely no plan for following up a military victory with a reconstruction plan other than fattening the wallets of his campaign contributors, our ignorant President disbands the Iraqi army creating a vacuum filled by Shi’ite militia thereby ceding an enormous amount of prestige and influence to Iran.
4.  The attacks against American forces in Iraq are not coming from these Shia militia, but from Sunni forces who are the driving force behind the violence in Iraq.  These Sunni forces are proxies of Saudi Arabia who is seeking to limit Iranian influence in the region.  Rather than target these Sunni death squads, Bush’s policy is to go after Shia militia in Baghdad.  Huh?
5.  Now that things are completely FUBAR in Iraq, now that our President, virtually unaided, has created the conditions for increasing Iranian influence in Iraq, and with a few deft manipulations of some Saudi hidden hand, Bush rattles his sword at Iran.  Having created this chance for Iran to expand its influence in the region through unmitigated incompetence, Bush now “confronts” the threat he himself brought into being.  

We certainly don’t benefit from isolating Iran.  American interests, in Iraq in particular and from a security standpoint in general, would be best advanced through constructive engagement with Iran.  But that would diminish Saudi influence in particular and Sunni influence in wider Islam.  

I can only imagine how much better off the world would be if only little George had summoned up the courage to actually serve his country in his youth rather than let his Daddy get him into the Air National Guard so that he could play at being a pilot and then not even make it through that token service.  The world suffers while little George deals with his personal cowardice as an adult with our precous sons and daughters by sending them to do something he and Cheney vigorously avoided in their youth.

By I digress…..just look for those Saudi hands.  Whenever Bush speaks, they are hard to find.

This, in The New Yorker, is a must read on this subject.  http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070305fa_fact_hersh

This rambling meditation started out as a comment to a diary and it isn’t anywhere near where I want it to be, so I’m offering it up hoping that perhaps some clarification can be discovered somewhere.  

People of The Book

People of The Book is a term used by Muslims to favorably describe their fellow Middle Eastern religionists, Jews and Christians.  The term refers to the fact that the heroes of the Old Testament are common to all traditions, as well as to their shared monotheism.  This descriptive phrase seemed a good beginning for this meditation on a religious fundamentalism that is sometimes referred to as a “clash of civilizations” but which is, in fact, also a shared tradition among all three Middle Eastern religions.   What we in America call Right Wing Christian Fundamentalism is echoed by similar conservative fundamentalisms in Judaism and Islam.  These fundamentalisms are the primary cause of the catastrophic situation in Iraq, the broader Middle East and the world at large.  
The primary foundation for all three fundamentalisms is the idolatry of the Book which is fostered by a belief that these writings not simply represent but actually are the literal words of God (of course as these words are interpreted by the various leaders of the sect).  Rather than read sacred writings in order to attune oneself to the divine, a literalistic fundamentalist (whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew) reads contemporary behavior prescriptions into historically and culturally dependent words.  Secondarily, all three fundamentalisms are a reaction to and rejection of The Enlightenment.  The very core of these three fundamentalisms is part an attempt to “literalize” an entire religious tradition, and part is a reaction to the very existence of our modern world.

Christians who slavishly treat what they call the “Old” Testament as a set of behavior prescriptions for the modern world are in direct contradiction to the self-described mission of Jesus who came to transcend and affirm the Law. The best way to illuminate this is to compare the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mark with the Gospel of John.  (By the way, if anyone is interested in reading a book about the last days of Jesus that isn’t the schlock of Gibson’s movie, read The Last Week, a book about the last week of Jesus based upon a reading of Mark’s gospel.  It’s an excellent book, and you’ll notice much of what follows in this paragraph comes from that book).  Mark’s Jesus never claims to be God.  He asks his followers what they think.   And then he asks them to follow him.  What does he mean by “follow?”  He certainly doesn’t mean to worship, which is what John in his Gospel written a generation later interprets Jesus to mean.  When Jesus says to follow, he means to simply act the way he does.  Give up wealth and possessions, serve the destitute and unclean, the refuse of society, and demand that the empire and its collaborators serve justice and righteousness.  For a fuller take on this see http://rescuejesus.blogspot.com/2006/04/following-jesus-not-worshiping-jesus.html

By the time of the gospel of John Jesus is a god to be worshipped not someone to be followed.  If you think about it, it’s more convenient to worship Jesus than to actually follow in his iconoclastic footsteps.

Jesus supported how he acted by interpreting the Tanakh, his sacred writings of the Law and the Prophets, not as an exact blueprint of precise behavioral prescriptions but as a guide to help him find God, whom he called the Father.  For Jesus, and for anyone who wants to live spiritually rather than religiously, the way to God can only be achieved by each one of us individually.  How we relate to God is simply how we relate to God.  We can’t do it by copying someone else’s “way.”  For Jesus and other mystics the way to God is direct and experiential, not something mediated.  And the way to God for the rest of us who are not Jesus or Paul or Mohammed or Moses is to re-enact the original mystical experience of God.  Through reading we must get to the experience of God at the core while at the same time avoiding the easy way out of making the story of that original experience into a fetish or an idol.  These writings are only a door to God, not any kind of expression made by God.

For unquestioning “true believers”, the Koran, Tanakh, and the Bible are the literal story of God’s plan for and interaction with humanity.  Christianity, Islam, and Judaism believe that the universe is a creature of time as well as space: that God created it with a purpose and that that purpose fulfills itself in a process that began with creation and will end in some future time.  

The notion that the universe will end is a speculation based upon human experience of evil.  If God created the universe and it is good, then why is there evil in the world? When that evil gets so pronounced, the speculation goes, then God will come back to earth and kill the evildoers for us (we all presume that we’re the good ones) and then everything will be just fine   John the Baptist is the most illuminating figure of this kind of speculation on the end with his apocalyptic ranting about wheat, chaff and the threshing floor and fire.  For the Baptist the world of Roman hegemony and Judean upper class collaboration was too evil to continue to exist, and he couldn’t wait until God did it in.   A lot of right wing religious zealots in America agree with him, although, unlike John the Baptist, they are actually equivalent to the collaborationists.  

In the greatest irony of history, the human being Jesus who was transformed into part of a triune deity that sent itself down to earth to save mankind, actually demonstrated with his speech and with his life that God is never coming to eradicate evil for us but rather that God demands that we refuse to submit to it and eradicate it ourselves.  

The literalism that saps spiritual truth out of these religious books is best demonstrated by looking at the central story of Judaism:  the founding of God’s Chosen People by the exodus from bondage in Egypt and the trek through the wilderness to The Promised Land.  To do so, however, requires that we understand a little bit about the religious world of the Ancient Middle East.  

Scholars have called the societies of the Ancient Near East that populated the geography now known as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Iran and Lebanon “cosmological empires.”   Babylon, Persia, Egypt of the Pharaohs, all identified themselves as earthly analogs of a cosmic society of divine beings.  The gods regulated all aspects of human production and reproduction.  Social order was an analog of the society of the gods. In the same manner as humans existed for the pleasure of the gods, so certain segments of society existed for the pleasure of other segments.  In a cosmological empire, Mel Brooks had it right; “it’s good to be the king.”  The purpose of the king or emperor was to insure that the gods were placated so that crops grew, human and animals reproduced, and water flowed.  Eric Voegelin commented that the rise and fall of these cosmological societies had as much meaning as a tree falling in the forest.  Each society had its own version of a rite of renewal which is echoed in modern, spiritually denatured New Year’s celebrations.  

Some thirty centuries ago a desert dweller in the Middle East, maybe it was Moses talking to a burning bush, made a discovery.  God was in fact a god of justice and righteousness, not a god of reproduction human, vegetable or animal.  What would such a discovery mean?  First of all, it would divide that persons “history” into a before and after.  And the before would now be interpreted as the preparation for the after.   Second, it meant that their “exodus” from Egypt and its cosmological religion was a spiritual movement from bondage to freedom under Yahweh.  Anyone familiar with the story of the exodus thinks of the DeMille version starring Charlton Heston as Moses leading a huge number of Israelite slaves out of Egypt.  Such a mass migration is not mentioned anywhere in the historical records of the Egyptians.  The actual exodus was likely to have been only a few families who later became the “ancestors” of those who came to occupy Canaan along with its indigenous population.  But that exodus became symbolic of the discovery of the new spiritual truth that God is Yahweh, a god of righteousness and justice.  But even right at the beginning of this new discovery was an interpretation that defined this as an actual God-inspired and God-directed invasion.  

This ambivalence is at the heart of Judaism.  Ultra-orthodox Jews believe that the literal exodus and the literal choosing of them by God give them the right to occupy The Promised Land.  They don’t see the exodus as the spiritual founding of a people but as a concrete invasion of property.  For modern fundamentalists the question is, if God meant for them to occupy all of Judea and Samaria, how can they possibly compromise with Palestinians and give that “promised land” up?

At its experiential core, literalism is the attempt to “save” the spiritual truth that lies at the heart of every religion.  Experiences of god are universal to humans.  They are intimate, personal, overpowering, and life changing.  They are the infusion of God into the world.   The crusty old Greeks identified the human soul as the locus of that divine infusion.  Religions are attempts to save the truth of that infusion by worshipping the event or person equated with that infusion of the divine into human reality.  Invariably these attempts to save experience through literalizing the expression of that experience fail and thus destroy the truth they are attempting to save.  The example of how Christianity made Jesus a God to be worshipped rather than as a way to find God will show how this happens.

For Christians, unlike Jews or Muslims who see God’s pivotal revelation in books, the human being Jesus is what Marcus Borg has called “the decisive revelation of God.”   In other words, Jesus reveals as much of god as can be shown in a human life or what a life filled with god would look like.    Mark’s gospel captures this most closely by his symbol of `the way” and Jesus’ constant invitation to his disciples to follow the way and their almost universal failure to stay on the path.  It’s easier to worship Jesus than to live a life equivalent to one the he lived.  John’s gospel is the first derailment into the convenience of worship rather than the struggle to follow the way.   It is much easier for us to worship the post Easter Jesus as salvation than to follow the pre Easter Jesus on the path of faithfulness to God’s justice and righteousness on this earth that requires us to stand with the social outcasts, poor, and homeless against the “haves” of society who collaborate with imperial domination and against Rome.  

When the divine intrudes into our mundane world through the soul of a concrete individual human being that person’s life is transformed.  That person lives life differently after this infusion of the divine.  Paul’s vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus is one of the most recognizable examples of this process.   The spiritual path that those mystics that have revolutionized human history take is to involve others in the world as constituted by their vision.  This can’t be done directly because God relates to all of us individually.  Jesus is superior to Paul because Jesus attempted to draw others into the world of his vision through parables which while not factually true are spiritually true and enable the listener to find his own path to God while Paul made statements about this new reality that listeners could only accept or reject.   That is the salient difference between the spiritual path of Jesus and the religious path that began with Paul and derailed into the edifice that is now Christianity.  It’s the difference between the gospels of Mark and Thomas which are about following a path and beginning a search and the gospel of John which is about worshipping.

Read this piece in Alternet.  It is a moving story of heroism that must be placed in glowing contrast with the mendacity, incompetence and hubris of Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Hannity and all pseudo-patriots who have never served in our military and had their lives at risk.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43779/

Elizabeth de la Vega writes about Ricky Clousing in Tomdispatch.  Clousing is a soldier who went AWOL to protest Bush’s Iraq catastrophe because he refused to accept the Army’s “legitimate” ways to get out of his service.  Clousing witnessed what he calls the murder of a young Iraqi boy by a member of his squad while on patrol.  

That Iraqi boy died on the way to the hospital. I think the boy in Ricky Clousing died that day as well, but what an extraordinary man he has since become. Deciding he would be haunted forever if he kept silent about such an egregious violation of the rules of engagement, Sgt. Clousing notified the unit’s Platoon Sergeant, who did not “take kindly” to his advice.

Clousing continued to object to American war crimes for the rest of his time in Iraq, though no one ever took kindly to his objections. When he returned to the U.S., he talked to his commanding officers, to the chaplain, to mental health workers and anyone else who would listen to his problems with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He was told he could get out of the Army — if he said he was gay. But he couldn’t say that because he’s not gay. He was told to claim he had post-traumatic stress disorder, but he couldn’t do that because he didn’t think he had PTSD. He was told to file as a conscientious objector; but he couldn’t do that because he wasn’t against all war. He was told he could avoid going back to Iraq by taking an assignment in the United States. He couldn’t do that either

Whether or not I happen to agree with his characterization as murder or as an accident of war that happens when young men are placed in ridiculous, murderous situations by their commander in chief with no end in sight, here’s what I respect about Clousing

“I felt that my involvement in the army, whether it be directly or indirectly, whether in Iraq or training guys to go to Iraq, I was still that piece of machine in the system that was still allowing this war to take place and still supporting that. My actions, whether or not they were on the front line or back safely at home, were still part of the body of the machine that’s occupying [Iraq]. So I ultimately felt that the only thing I could do was to leave, so I packed my stuff last June and I went AWOL.”

On August 11, 2006, the day he turned himself in, Sgt. Clousing made a simple statement:

“We have found ourselves in a pivotal era where we have traded humanity for patriotism. Where we have traded our civil liberties for a sense of security. I stand here before you sharing the same idea as Henry David Thoreau: as a soldier, as an American, and as a human being, we mustn’t lend ourselves to that same evil which we condemn.”

I have a lot of respect for this young man.  Ricky Clousing and I hold the same opinion of the situations we were placed in by misguided Commanders in Chief, me to a jungle and he to a desert.  When I was surviving in the jungle thinking the same thoughts about what I was doing there that Clousing was thinking about what he was doing in the desert he and I made different choices.  Even though I am satisfied with my choice….I stayed in and fought with my comrades-in-arms because of my loyalty to and love of them not to my country…..I am incredibly impressed by the courage of this young man.  

De la Vega says it very well.

Ricky Clousing — now serving a three-month sentence in a military brig at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina — is not the only peace hero. Others are making themselves known in growing numbers and you can read about them at the Courage to Resist website. Although we have no way of assessing the numbers from here, I have no doubt that there are also soldiers trying to do the right thing in Iraq.

But when I read about a President who doesn’t know the meaning of “outrages upon human dignity” because he so clearly does not consider the very people he claims to have liberated human; when I read about a vice president who does not even have the courage to admit to the meaning of the words he uses (“dunk in the water,” “last throes”); when I read about a defense secretary who tells reporters to back off if the questions get too tough, then I think about Ricky Clousing.

I’m ashamed at the leadership of our country.  They are incompent, arrogant, and too ignorant to realize it.  Ricky Clousing makes me as proud to be an American as the heroes I was lucky enough to hang around 40 years ago.

By the way, this is why we have to bury these fuckers at the polls on Nov. 7th.