God Loves a Busy-Body

"I think God is going to destroy this nation, not just ... California. Look at all our jobs, our jobs are going overseas. God is judging this nation. It's going to get worse."
Born-again Christian Bill Hampsmire

Because everyone knows that given all of the things that America has done throughout its history it's this one thing that would get God's attention, and that He prefers Pagans and the stridently anti-religious to Christians who simply have better things to do than meddle in their neighbor's love lives...

Sachiel: Mankind has founded a new nation, America, and say they will devote it to God.
Zeruel: Great news!
Sachiel: Yes, truly. I shall observe them, and see how they progress.
God: As you do so, Sachiel, tell me of their doings.

Sachiel: It seems that they are bent on removing the native population from valuable land, using force or disease on those who refuse to leave.
God: Let them be. That is nothing to be concerned with. The Natives do not revere Me. It is better that the righteous have the land.

Sachiel: They have adopted the practice of wholesale enslavement of their fellow humans, buying and selling them like cattle, and destroying their families.
God: I fail to see the problem here, as they have removed those enslaved from a pagan continent and introduced them to My worship.

Sachiel: Now they have developed horrific weapons of war, harnessing the power of the atom, and deployed them against the civilian populations of their enemies.
God: Such is the way of things. Shinto is a tool of the Adversary*.

Zeruel: Hello, Sachiel! You seem to be in a better mood today.
Sachiel: Things are looking up. America has abandoned the acts of their past, and is starting to grant its people the freedom to love who they will, and recognition of their unions.
God: How dare they! I shall punish them sorely for this affront. They shall be unemployed, their livelihoods given over to pagan Hindus and anti-religious Communists.
Sachiel: Sigh. Friend Zeruel, have you Lucifer's e-mail address? I should see if he's taking résumés.

* This was the position of the Portuguese, who set out to eradicate Shinto, seeing its superficial resemblance to Christianity as proof that it had been created by Satan to lead the Japanese astray.

Keep and Bear

The Supreme Court's ruling that the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects individual citizens from blanket firearms bans seems to have placed half the nation into an uproar. The gun-rights crowd is hailing it as a great day for liberty, anti-handgun crusaders are pronouncing dire warnings of blood in the streets and the Europeans are convinced that we're all violent sociopaths.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
The Second Amendment to the Constitution

A lot has been made of the "well regulated Militia" clause, in holding that the "people" referred to in the amendment are actually collectives - namely the states and the nation as a whole. In light of American history, however, this seems odd. Up until the Civil War, and perhaps beyond then, it wasn't uncommon for men to enlist in the army, or their state's militia, with their own weapons - a practice that the writers of the constitution likely supposed that the nation would continue to rely on. The argument that the United States no longer needs to rely upon individuals responding to call-ups with their own weapons is a very valid one.

But I suspect that the answer to that is to amend the Constitution again, rather than creating an expiration clause where one doesn't otherwise exist.

Best. Headline. Ever.

"God accused of selling cocaine near Tampa church"

Must need the money to pay off the lawsuits from the clergy sex abuse scandal. I guess that selling indulgences just wouldn't provide the revenue stream.

The Third Ear

The most recent column from George Will is titled "Liberalism likes victimization narratives." I don't know that this is an unfair characterization. If the guiding force of Conservatism is that: "The world is inherently fair, and it is primarily the interference of government that makes it unfair," the guiding principle of Liberalism would be that: "The world in inherently unfair, and the primary role of government is to redress that injustice." (For the record, I have trouble with both camps, believing that "fairness" neither occurs naturally, nor can be imposed by any human agency.) Personally, I have a hard time characterizing anyone who gets the short end of the stick as a "victim," but some folks do, and the stereotypical Conservative response is to mock them for it.

The column starts out with Will's contention that: "Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said." Upon which basis, his column takes a sharp right turn into what are unfair characterizations. Apparently, hearing what is not said allows one to put words in the mouths of others - positive words when you want them, and negative words when you need to attack someone. Will creates a number of phantom strawmen, attributing them to things his ever-listening third ear heard Senator Obama say, and then hacking them to bits with a few deft tangerines-to-oranges comparisons. (Will is smart enough to avoid the far more obvious apples-to-oranges comparisons.)

Example: When I was in college, it was understood that more Black men went to jail than went to college. The 4-or-5 to one ratio of black women to black men at the college that I went to seemed proof enough of that. Will quotes Senator Obama as saying a year ago "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Will counters with: "Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail." But go back and read Will's snippet of Obama's speech again. Where does Obama say that there are more black men IN prison than IN college? You could just as easily read his point as that more young black men GO to prison than GO to college. It is Will's third ear, and a slightly altered parsing of a phrase, that creates a lie where perhaps none existed before.

This, I suspect, is part of the way that the next several months will go - on both sides of the political divide, with third ears carefully hearing what no-one has said, in the search for ammunition to use against political opponents.

GOP Cartoonists For Hillary

Chuck Asay's take on why Senator Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination. One of the things that I find interesting is the "Affirmative action" reference, a nod to Geraldine Ferraro's contention that Obama's success relied more on his race than anything else. If you read Asay's other cartoons, it's pretty obvious that he's a Republican, so you'd think that he wouldn't care all that much about the Democratic primary. I suspect we'll see more overt GOP sniping at the Obama campaign over the Hillary issue as time goes on.