The Rake Magazine

If you Christians don't quit worshipping golden calf statues, I'm gonna smash your laws.

I was just listening to MPR's Talk of the Nation, and they were discussing the Supreme Court's recent rulings on the display of the Ten Commandments in public space.

It was going along about as these things usually do (everyone treated with courtesy and respect--even the most preposterous--and everyone quite sonorous and boring) until we got to the inevitable Christian boob-of-a-caller. This guy, in a spirit of American tolerance and ecumenism, suggested that, since we, (the Christians,) get to place the Ten Commandments monuments, it would be okay with him if the "Jewish people" could put a symbol of their religion in our courthouses, too.

Now that's entertainment I'm willing to pay a membership fee for.

And after we bomb Cambodia, I've instructed the National Guard to shoot four students at an Ohio college...

Michael Smith, the London Sunday Times reporter who broke the story of the Downing Street memo has followed up with two more pieces. It seems, in his piece from last Sunday, that the Americans were bombing Iraq in order to provoke Saddam six weeks before the American Congress authorized military action against Iraq.

Today in the LA Times, he explains it a bit further.

So what we have here is pretty good evidence, supplied by the British government itself, that Bush actually started the war in Iraq without Congressional authorization. I seem to recall secret U.S. bombing under a previous president.

Is it just me, or does that seem a little more serious than a few stains on a blue Gap dress? But, I could be wrong. What do you think?

(Thanks to my friend Kit for pointing out Smith's LA Times piece today.)

The body count our government doesn't want us to remember

I started to laugh today at David Brooks's piece in the NY Times. But then the feeling turned more to nausea.

According to Brooks, we shouldn't run our Iraq policy based on polls that say most Americans think we should pull out. I couldn't agree more that government policy of any kind shouldn't be run by what the people want, because let's face it, the American people are, in general, ill-informed and easily manipulated. (Hell, supposedly a majority of Americans believe in the six-day creation story. And you want to trust something as complex as our Middle East policy to them? Sheesh.)

But what really got me, though, was the different set of numbers Brooks offered up as ones we should give credence to in deciding what we should do in Iraq.

Here they are: "U.S. forces have completed a series of successful operations, among them Operation Spear in western Iraq, where at least 60 insurgents were killed and 100 captured, and Operation Lightning in Baghdad, with over 500 arrests. American forces now hold at least 14,000 suspected insurgents, and have captured about two dozen lieutenants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."

For those of you too young to remember, we used to get this sort of "information", i.e. body counts, in the last moronic war we let our lying government get us in to. In that war, we certainly killed over one million of our enemy, but they "only" got 55,000 or so of us. Strangely, even though we out-killed them over 20 to 1, we lost.

If you need a further hint as to what I'm talking about, the Prime Minister of that country was here this week to visit Bush and Rumsfeld. And oh yes, now we're going to send him some military advisors.

Honesty, I'm not making this up.

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One more brief thing today: if you need more evidence that the wrong guy got to take over the White House 5 years ago, read this.

I think a lot of people have been saying this lately: the moderates among us Christians have to step up and make our views preeminent over those radically conservative Christians who would take over, and in some cases have tken over, our government.

We've received some unexpected praise here for our cover story this month--primarily because we wrote about Dean Johnson, a minister, for God's sake, who doesn't believe he has the exclusive insight into God's will, and doesn't try to wield government power as if it were God's hammer.

Thank God for Christians like him in our government, and for John Danforth, former senator from Missouri and Episcopal minister. His op-ed piece in the NY Times today is the most eloquent call to moderate Christians we've seen in a long time.

Read it. And when you're done, say "Amen." The Revs Johnson and Danforth represent just the sort of Christians we need more of in our capitols--and in our churches, for that matter.

To serve and protect

Not that anyone who has an ounce of time or a brain cell to spare is reading Katherine Kersten's column, but in case you've already been to the dentist as much as you can afford because listening to the high pitched squeal of your dentist's drill is more pleasurable than reading her whine, I'm gonna give you a little more root canal. I promise to stop soon.

Today, she scratches the Terri Schiavo scab again. If Kersten had any thought behind her compulsion to lecture us, she'd know that raising this issue, both to genuine conservatives and to liberals, ain't doing the cause of the attempted Christian takeover of the American government any good.

She's trying hard though. How about the image of the "armed policeman", (presumably in the pay of the gay-marrying, abortion-legalizing, Patriot Act-skeptical, activist judges) keeping the forces of good at bay? Then there's the inevitable invocation of Nazi Germany at the end. Yup, if we let the Nazis take over, pretty soon our government might be lying to put the country into a war, spying on the reading habits of its citizens, and trying to pass laws discriminating against a class of citizens whom we don't like.

Yup, we wouldn't want a government like that, would we?