Interesting how a word can change over time, isn’t it; like the term “Gerrymander,” which used to be pejorative. However, today, our Republican dominated Supreme Court has upheld the Gerrymandering of Texas accomplished by Tom Delay last year. I won’t detail the new and bizarre map of Texas though it looks something like a butcher’s chart for chopping up a Texas steer. It’s composed of hundreds of square miles of wiggly zigzagging real estate in which some districts nearly bisect others. Instead,Kathy Gill does a marvelous job of dissecting the ungainly critter.

The eye-popping horror bothers me because this court’s decision paves the way forredistricting willy-nilly any time a state congress becomes dominated by one or the other of the two parties. It means that before the next election many Red state congresses will attempt to Gerrymander their own states in hopes of retaining their Republican majority despite the popular vote. It means that we may be seeing the end of the Two Party System. Damn! I hope I’m over reacting.

Why ever did we elect a Republican Congress, Senate, and President at the national level in the first place? Are we “Amurcans” - as our President pronounces the word - unable to connect the dots? The United States President gets to appoint Supreme Court justices. A Republican President elected for two terms appointed two new and extremely conservative justices thus creating a Supremely conservative Supreme Court. A Republican Congress, Senate, President and Supreme Court means that the checks and balances the forefathers designed into the structure of our government no longer exist.

If any of you out there feel that the government is running rough shod over you, you’re right. It is! And now, with this new Supreme Court ruling, it may continue to do so ad infinitum, ad nausium.

David Safavian, former Bush White House chief procurement officer has been found guilty of covering up his connections with Republican Influence-peddler Jack Abramoff. Safavian was convicted after eight days of testimony concerning Safavian’s help to Abramoff with government-owned real estate, and a seven day golf excursion to the famous St. Andrews golf course in Scotland and London with Ohio congressman, Bob Ney (Rep.), two Ney aids, and Christian Coalition Founder, Ralph Reed, organized and paid for by Abramoff. Most interesting to me is the involvement of Ralph Reed because once again it demonstrates how much evangelical Christian leadership participates in influence peddling. The now Republican Lt. Governor of Georgia, Reed has also participated in the past with Abramoff, and Michael Scanlon in preventing the opening of new Louisiana and Texas gambling casinos that would compete with Scanlon’s casino clients, the Coushatta Indians (2002). Reed’s consulting firm, Century Strategies has earned millions through his evangelical religious credentials from such companies as Enron, Microsoft, Verizon, and other Fortune 500 companies. Specifically his company earned over $300,000.00 from the former energy giant, Enron to help build support for energy deregulation. Reed through Century Strategies also worked to get out the Southern states Bush vote in the 2000 and 2004 elections. And, while it is difficult to demonstrate financial gain, the question has not been resolved as to the legality of a corporate entity being involved financially to actually obtain votes for a particular political candidate.

Personally, this information makes me angry because while Reed and other evangelical Christians would condemn millions of Americans to second-class citizenship because of sexuality; at the same time these heterosexual Christians have no moral scruples concerning their own financial and political dealings. Their religious belief system is selective in that it prescribes and restricts only the behavior of others, not that of its practitioners.

At some point in time, it becomes the obligation of Democratic Party leadership to make an issue of this double standard in evangelical morality as it is applied to politics and government in the Bush administration. I wish that Democrats would do so before the next election - but despair at the lack of any such persons in the party possessing strong personality, liberal Christian belief, and good character – in order to counter this corrupting evangelical chauvinistic Christianity at the center of Republican politics.

Sources

“Official Found Guilty for Covering-up Abramoff Ties.” CNN.COM, http://www.cnn.com/. Posted Tuesday, June 20, 2006,10:25 AM. Visited Tuesday, June 20, 2006, 12:53 PM EDT.

“Safavian Found Guilty in Abramoff Lobbying Case.” National Public Radio, http//:www.npr.org/. Posted June 20, 2006. Visited Tuesday, June 20, 2006, 12:58 PM EDT.

Welna, David, “Ney in the Eyes of His Constituents,” All Things Considered, January 6, 2006. National Public Radio, http//:www.npr.org/. Visited Tuesday, June 20, 2006, 1:01 PM EDT.

Up, down, all around.
His popularity’s
More sound.

Happy Republicans
Congress and Senate
Kick Democrat’s cans
With proposals designed
To corner and separate,
Roads “Rovian” mined,
Peaceniks berate,
And troop withdrawals
With weakness equate,

Yes.

Up, down, all around
His popularity’s
More sound.

Doesn’t matter
The war’s immorality -
With evangelical patter
This crusade's
An okay matter.

Dennis Kucinich (D Congressman, 10th District, Ohio) has said often, and I paraphrase, that the second war in Iraq is morally wrong because we are the aggressor. He proceeds to say that the weapons of mass destruction charge was false, the contention that Saddam sought Uranium from Niger was false, and that there was no connection between Saddam and Al Queda. All of which have proved to be true. The new attempt by the Republican dominated congress to equate Al Queda and the Iraq war, withdrawal with lack of patriotism and care for our armed services personnel is a "Rovian" move to draw attention away from the fact that Democrats do actually care for our armed services personnel who have been wrongfully deployed in a war that is killing thousands of innocent Iraqis as well as our own young men and women.

Congressman Kucinich is right, but I also wonder what is it in our society that has allowed us to proceed in this self-centered war with lacunae of amazing ignorance, the wrong (Six Month – remember?) war against terror, and then to continue to defend it after 3 years. It has certainly not produced the political stability in the Middle East that the Neo-conservative intellectual Republicans predicted. In fact, it has produced the opposite, a new terrorist government in Palestine, a belligerent Iran seeking atomic power and weapons, and an Iraq embroiled in civil unrest and aggression between the Sunni and Shia Islamic factions. While the current state of affairs may have been predictable from the outset in 2002 when Mr. Bush’s administration was gearing up for the current war, I continue to question what it was in our culture that allowed the American people to be so easily convinced that a preemptive war of aggression was the proper course to pursue.

Could it be that our society grants the right of men to aggression against one another, and that a corollary to that right is the right to bear arms against one another? Notice, I wrote “men,” not “men and women.” I speculate here that this right to aggression is also based in the opposition of the sexes into male equals superior, and female equals inferior. As proof I offer the following statements. Black, brown, and white male youths kill one another in the cities, and white male youths kill other youths and teachers in the schools. Expressing road rage men shoot others in highway altercations. Men on domestic air flights must be subdued after exploding into maniacal fits against fellow passengers and flight attendants. I also ask, does the assumed right to armed aggression extend to the culture at large? Is our culture a belligerent masculine entity that is defined by the right to bear arms against other cultures?

Stay tuned.

Notice the wording in the following sentence.

The special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald has decided that Carl Rove is not to be charged in the Valerie Plame leak case. There is nothing to disclose whether Rove is innocence or guilty of leaking Plame’s identity as a CIA agent, and thereby threatening her safety, only that he will not be charged. So, he is free to spin some marvelous Machiavellian mechanization to keep Republicans in charge of the Senate and Congress after the November 2006 elections. Or, do I ascribe too much power to the man.

No. We, the citizens of the USA are gullible as Rove proved in the 2004 election. The question is, what new melody(s) will the Pied -"Bush's Brain"- Piper of modern-day Hamlin create with which to lead us into the ever increasingly dark and muddied waters of the wrong war on terror.*

*2Moore, J., & Slater, W.. Bush’s Brain: How Carl Rove Made George W. Bush President. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2003.

One maniacal terrorist thug has become a martyr. The question in my mind is, will the Jordanian, Al-Zargawi’s death slow the sectarian violence in Iraq? Zargawi wanted to destroy as many Iraqi Shia as possible in order to instigate a civil war, though it’s difficult for me to understand why he, a Sunni Muslim hated another type of Muslim, the Shia so much. There is no parallel in the West today, though historically fifteenth and sixteenth century Western Europe provides us with the vision of governments and Christian Catholic Church in cahoots with one another in the attempt to persecute Christian Protestants.

I have tried to picture what the United States would be like today if evangelical Christians hated liberal and LGBT Christians as intensely as some Sunni hate the Shia in the Arab countries. While evangelical prejudices are frustrating and have caused the three branches of our government to waist much valuable time on the proposed marriage amendment instead of dealing with the important issues at hand, it is almost impossible to imagine our country involved in a civil war based on religious intolerance. Since, it is at least partially our fault that Iraq teeters on the brink of civil war, let us hope that we manage to help the Iraqis achieve a national unity in which Shia, Sunni, and Kurd put away the guns and respect one another’s differences. I could even wish Mr. Bush “good luck” if he were to express that as an objective.

Bush and the Republican Houses of Congress and Senate hope to shore up their sagging ratings by pandering to their evangelical Christian base. We already have a Federal law that limits marriage to that between a man and a woman, "The Defense of Marriage Act." Why do we need a constitutional amendment to do the same thing? Why do we want to create a second class of citizenship anyway? When will the rest of us wake up and decide we want our country back?

Human Rights Campaign