Happy @#$! Easter, President @#$! Bush!

[Plaid Adder]

I do my best to promote rational debate, but every once in a while you just gotta RANT. I have a lot of backed-up rant in me because I didn't do a column last week. Stand back, folks, there's gonna probably be some profanity.

I'm not practicing any more, but I did grow up Catholic, and for a long time I took the whole thing very seriously. To tell you the truth, what soured me first on religion was not the whole sexual orientation thing, but the realization of how hypocritical the whole thing was as regards money. I grew up in a pretty affluent town and I went to a pretty affluent church. I sat there looking around at all the affluence and thinking, "These people are never going to sell all they have and give it to the poor. And I know I'm never going to either. We're not real Christians. In fact, we're pretty lame."

So I don't go to mass any more; but I do value some of the bits of Catholic culture that stuck to me, and one of them is the idea that you are responsible for alleviating the suffering of others. Which of course implies that you're not supposed to CAUSE the suffering of others if you can avoid it. Lent is supposed to be a time of contemplation during which you think about how you have done wrong and try to think about how to do better. Good Friday is supposed to remind you of the terrible gulf between what you should be doing for your fellow creatures and what you are actually doing, and Easter is supposed to give you hope that despite your own inevitable inadequacies and failures, good will eventually win, and someday, nobody will be suffering any more.

Which is why it drives me nuts that, simply because our super-Christian super-zealous super-holy God-Bless-America-spouting faith-fucking-based President doesn't give a shit about anything but his own profit and comfort, we as a country got to celebrate Easter Week by watching our troops and the Iraqis to whom we are allegedly bringing democracy slaughter each other.

I haven't been reading the atheist/religious threads. Personally, I don't care whether my fellow DUers believe in God or not. What drives me fucking INSANE is watching people who *say* they are devout Christians violate every last damn one of the principles Jesus laid down in the Gospels, starting with "love thy neighbor as thyself." Yo, George, 'neighbor' does not mean Karl Rove, nor does it mean your buddies up there at Walker Point. We're ALL your neighbors, you unutterable asshole, and you know what, you don't love a single goddamn one of us even close to one one hundredth of the way you love yourself. If you did, maybe you'd have thought twice before you decided to start a war that would be guaranteed to kill thousands of your neighbors.

I mean really, George. What the hell is the matter with you? You think Jesus is sitting up there smiling down on all this bloodshed? You think after you go to heaven you're gonna get a medal for this? Did you read some kind of upside-down and backwards Bible where Jesus says "and if your enemy strike you, call in the air strikes and flatten not only your enemies but any surrounding villages who might have been offering them aid and comfort and then for good measure just set the whole rest of the country on fire because you never know what they *might* get up to 5 or 10 years from now?"

Or is even that giving you too much credit? Is it just that you are incapable of thinking beyond the next pretzel? I mean who IS in charge here? Cause I'm wondering. Cheney's going to be holding your leash while you testify; not only does Bremer clearly think he's running the entire Iraq campaign singlehanded, it appears that he is on his way to declaring himself Emperor and decreeing that any attack against any American soldier, mercenary, or civilian should be classified as regicide and punished as such. Meanwhile you spent half of this horrible week out at the ranch in Crawford. What ARE we paying you for? 40% of your time since you took office has been spent on vacation. Dude, if you're gonna go part time, fine, but I don't see why you're still eligible for benefits.

:grr:

Years ago when I first saw *Apocalypse Now* it occurred to me that I should be old enough to remember the last year or two of the Vietnam War. But I don't. I asked my mother about this. She said, "Oh, that was deliberate. We didn't let you guys watch television." She said that my older brother, who was born in 1966, used to come running in from the living room with the day's body count, and one day she thought, OK, that's enough of that, and stopped watching the news while we were around.

How kind of Bush to ensure that I am now getting all those Vietnam memories, 30 years later.

:grr:

I don't give a shit who's firing on whom. We had no legitimate reason to *go* to war there int he first place and so every one of those death on BOTH sides is unholy and unnecessary and every last one of those is on YOUR HEAD, George. If you had any way of understanding what that really means, I am sure you would explode into a thousand tiny bits. I guess it's probably just as well for you that you have NO FREAKING CLUE about the value of human life. Christian my ass! If Jesus ever does come back to earth the first thing he will do is sue your ass for trademark infringement. Because I'll tell you, you have NO RIGHT to be using his logo.

:argh: :argh: :argh:

OK, I'm done now.

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it in the spirit in which it was intended. And good luck to the rest of us, and may we soon see the day when Bush is retired to the obscurity he deserves where he can't do the world any more damage.

:grr:

The Plaid Adder

[greenbriar]

1. well said

I wish shrub would read this, but I am not sure he can read