November 2, 2007
by Paul Kemp
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It's the Halloween season, so it seems appropriate to talk about some monsters and ghouls who have been in the news lately.
Friends and neighbors, in November, 2008, we're voting to save our lives. Not from the Islamic terrorists, but from America's own religious and Neoconservative rightwingers. Our own religious extremists - the Evangelicals - believe in a cleansing, happy ending to our planet and the flawed human race by nuclear war and they're not afraid to start it.
The Neocons don't think setting the Middle East ablaze will get that bad; they just seem to think killing millions of Muslims to spread chaos and assert our hegemony over the world is a good thing. Very strange bedfellows for the Evangelicals, but they do share a key belief that Israel is the most important country in the Middle East and can do no wrong.
The United States is being guided in our foreign policy by an unholy alliance of former liberals/socialists (the NeoCons) who - for the most part - have no military experience but are playing off the unproven belief of the Evangelical Christian Right that the "End is Near" and we can speed it up by starting unprovoked wars in the Middle East. Wow. Where was I when we voted to approve such a major decision?
Of course, Americans only voted for seemingly mild-mannered, affable George W. Bush, a reformed alcoholic and Born Again Christian who claimed to be opposed to nation-building and in faor of "humble foreign policy." Do I smell a Trojan horse around here? or just a suggestible opportunist?
What happened to the "separation of Church and State?"
The Evangelicals are the same folks who believe the Bible word for word, except someone has ripped out the part about "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and highlighted all the stuff about the End Times.
These are the people who believe the earth was created in seven days. Along with the dinosaur fossils to mislead the sceptics, I suppose.
These are the folks we referred to as "Methodists who can't read and write," when we were growing up young Methodists in the deep South. "Don't confuse them with the facts" kind of summed it up.
Nice people until they got control of the world's biggest army! Now, it's Payback Time!
I guess the Evangelicals got tired of preaching on the streetcorner to an unrepentant world. So, they and the Neocons have the ear of VP Cheney and they're promoting World War IV. Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You! "Armageddon!"
In their supreme faith that they alone will be "raptured" and spared the mess that a major nuclear war will cause, they show their contempt for all of humanity and God's innocent creatures. Thinking they won't have to suffer, they are free to destroy the rest of us. This could give organized religion a bad name, for those who have forgotten the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and a few hundred other sordid incidents.
The Islamics are fighting to defend their religion and national sovereignty from U.S. troops in the Middle East. That, I can understand. That threat can easily be defused, believe it or not. Just pull out. Stop crowding them. They may still sell us oil, if China doesn't win them over.
That the Evangelicals are a militant wing of the followers of Jesus Christ (formerly known as the Prince of Peace), and now are a major voting bloc, is a frightening travesty and it should be countered at the polls by all thoughtful, caring Americans.
The Christian Right have been used by the Republican party for twenty years, in their fight against gays in the military, abortion, and now, the latest bugaboo to take the place of Communism: IslamoFacism. Perhaps they're getting frustrated at not being able to ban abortion by ammending the Constitution, so now they are ready to ignore the Constitution to drop some nukes on the Iranians who MIGHT be trying to build a nuclear bomb.
Read this quote by candidate for president, Governor Mike Huckabee:
"Governor Huckabee, same question ("if you were president of the United States, would you need to go to Congress to get authorization to take military action against Iran's nuclear facilities?")
Chris Matthews: "Do you need Congress to approve such an action?"
HUCKABEE: "A president has to [do] whatever is necessary to protect the American people. If we think Iran is building nuclear capacity that could be used against us in any way, including selling some of the nuclear capacity to some other terrorist group, then, yes, we have a right...
MATTHEWS: Without going to Congress?
HUCKABEE: "And I would do it in a heartbeat."
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If I really thought Huckabee was a "man of God," and disciple of Jesus Christ, I would take up Wicca. Obviously, he's not, though he may think he is. (Huckabee is a former Baptist minister.) Fortunately, my reading of the Bible gives me an entirely different picture of what Jesus, the "Prince of Peace," stood for. Are we reading the same book?
Keep in mind that these are the folks who will do anything to prevent the murder of the unborn (their term for abortion), but they have no qualms about incinerating half the Middle East in a nuclear first strike. "Thou shalt not kill" unless they are potentially troublesome Palestinian children with their toy AK-47s. Many of the more extreme actually want an all-out nuclear exchange in a place called Armageddon.
One of them might be living in the White House now. If so, that might explain some of George W. Bush' intransigence and disregard for the wishes of the electorate, who clearly want the Iraq war to end.
Dubya is "on a mission from God," or so he thinks.
For George, the Neocons, and Evangelical Armageddonites, the Iraq war is just the beginning. Iran and Syria are next. Then, when Russia and/or China steps in...who knows? Read Revelation if you want their game plan.
(Hmmmm..."Little George and the Armageddonites", could be a good name for a band. Or, how about "Dubya and the Flaming Neocons"?)
Armageddonites are the hardest of the hard core believers that Armageddon is to be desired. Dr. Gary North has estimated their number is 20 million. Hopefully, a lot of those are under voting age.
But what party or leader can we trust? The Democrats' frontrunners are similarly pledged to support the extreme elements of the Israeli government, which also wants Iran stopped in its drive to acquire nuclear power. No evidence has been found that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, but that doesn't deter the NeoCons and religious extremists working behind both parties to prevent Iran from enriching uranium for producing electricity.
Leading Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, has taken on NeoCon Norman Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor. Podhoretz, if you haven't heard of him, has a book out called "World War IV" and says he daily prays that Bush will bomb Iran. Whew!
(Where is Hunter S. Thompson when we need him?)
Perhaps war is some type of Freudian sublimation for the orgasms they've been missing. Who knows? Sexual repression tends to manifest in aggression sometimes. Perhaps this is a strange kind of insanity that comes from not taking the occasional drink or bong hit...who really knows?
All I know is that, as Rosa Brooks said in the LA Times on October 25, these folks need to be forcibly commited before they hurt any more people. Bush and Cheney and their Neocon henchmen are already responsible for what, a million Iraqi and Afghani deaths - civilian deaths?
It doesn't help that the President of Iran is himself a believer that the end of the world is coming (soon) for his Shia Muslim sect, bringing a heavenly reign of peace for their long-downtrodden people. He also believes, as many Shia do, that this final conflagration can be hurried by mankind - and he seems determined to do so by goading George W. into attacking his country.
Some wise person once said, "Suicide is a permanent solution for a temporary problem." That being said, it would be a shame to start a holocaust reducing the earth's population substantially and polluting the survivors with deadly radiation, just because we haven't learned to get along with people with differing points of view. But Bush refuses to sit down and talk with Ahmadinejad, as does Condi Rice and the A-Team of non-diplomats.
Fortunately, Governor Huckabee will probably not be asked to leave Arkansas to become president, so there is little danger that he will get entrusted with the nuclear launch codes, but we need to become aware of the dangerous ideologies that are infiltrating our government, intent of dragging us all into ever-escalating wars. The NeoConservatives and the warlike Religious Right, working in league with the Israel lobby (AIPAC), are all eager to use America's military might for their own nefarious ends, to wipe out their enemies, religious and secular.
The American people, we can only hope, will firmly reject these attempts to shanghai the high ideals and good name of this great country. We don't want to elect someone who will continue the Bush/Cheney course of threatening the Islamic nations with total destruction, only to have them call our bluff.
The Iranians proved that they value religious fervor more than their lives in the Iran/Iraq War. They could only gain by luring us into a trap where they surrounded our forces in Iraq, cut off our supply lines and wiped them out. Sink a few of our ships the the Strait of Hormuz, blocking 40% of the Middle East oil shipments, and our economy will be sunk. (See article by William S. Lind in American Conservative Magazine, Dec. 18, 2006, entitled "How to Lose an Army.")
Unfortunately, Bush may launch the attack on Iran before the election - and the Democratic leadership - if you can call it that - is unwilling to press forward on impeachment nor have they been willing to cut off the funding for the war, so barring a miracle, I guess we're all screwed.
The good news that might devolve from all this madness is that the U.S. would definitely lose any pretension to being the Top Dog in the world after losing an army in Iraq. Maybe...maybe then we would do some soul-searching and learn a little humility to replace our demolished hubris.
Me, I'm counting on a miracle. Like Defense Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff standing up to Bush and saying, "This is nuts! We're not going to attack Iran and risk losing our entire army in Iraq, too!"
I'm counting on there still being some rational people in Washington, but I may be overly optimistic.
P.S.: If you're wondering why the American voters aren't enraged by the criminal insanity of our leaders in Washington, this tidbit from the Nielsen organization may shed some light on the value we place on politics: During the first Republican Debate Forum in May, SpongeBob Squarepants got twice as many viewers as the GOP Debate. He also bested the Democrats' first debate by a smaller margin. Wrestling beat them all, by far!
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Paul Kemp awoke to the realities of American politics as a Conscientious Objector and war resister during the Vietnam era. He is an entrepreneur and writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He welcomes feedback through his website, www.defending-your-retirement.com/
