Thursday, March 27, 2008

3 Billion $ War

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel - Prize winning economist, has written a book that says if the Iraq War ended in the immediate future the cost to America would be greater than three trillion dollars. Do you know how many zeros that is? Try doing a cost benefit analysis on that you Harvard M.B.A. Republicans and see if Bear Stearns would give you a merit raise. Do you know what could be done with 3 trillion dollar$? It would fund Social Security and Medicare for 50 years and provide insurance coverage for 530 million people a year. Where are America's priorities? Have we gotten our money’s worth from the war yet? Did the war pay for itself with oil like "Big Time" Cheney claimed? Well in addition to making us less safe, creating more enemies of most of the world and driving gas prices to sights unseen it has bankrupted the U.S. Treasury, driven the value of the dollar to the lowest level in history, started a recession and put our economy and Constitution in the toilet. Four thousand U.S. soldiers dead, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and counting in a needless war against a country that had nothing to do with 911. And Osama's Bin Losen who? As “w” says, “and it was all done without raising them dad-gum taxes,” Well, mission accomplished. The overdue master card debt bill will come soon enough. What a legacy. I can't wait for "w"s third term under a senile McCain.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Changing the Subject Again

My how adroit right-wing republicans are at “smoke & mirrors” and changing the subject. Their party should be called the GOMP “Grand Old Magicians Party.” In the midst of one of the most serious financial crisis’ of our lifetime and with a futile and bottomless pit of wasted trillions of dollars and death on an endless war and corporate welfare bankrupting the U.S. Treasury and indebting our children’s future to Chinese slave-masters what are right-wingers concerned about? Obamas’ preacher, missing blond women and politicians’ sex-lives, that’s what. After decades of Republicans embracing and supporting nutty white fundamentalist preachers who rail about how God is punishing America through 911 because of gays, abortion, secular humanism and liberals and that the government should be overthrown by force then seized by God-fearing theocrats, one would think that what a preacher said wouldn’t surprise anyone. But according to right-wingers all the other REAL problems this country faces don’t matter. What’s important to them is that the subject has to shift from the infinite Republican “Bush failures” to scaring working folks enough to get them to vote against their own personal and financial interests. Dividing and conquering is the modus operandi Republicans use to win elections. They have used it to perfection for the last forty years. Do you think they will stop doing it now? Just listen to the right-wing media and you will perceive the obvious. Do you honestly think they would embrace a politician like Obama who encourages reconciliation and healing? Do you really think Bush would send the Federal Reserve in to bail you out if you lost your job or were going bankrupt the way they did Bear-Sterns? Don’t expect them to talk about the critical issues that face this country when they can inflame voters with irrelevant nonsense. When is this country and the media going to stop falling for their deception and tricks?

Monday, March 17, 2008

Straight from the Right-Wing Horse's Mouth

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

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Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here's Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:



If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]... then at a certain point force is justifiable.


And this:


In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools... There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union....


Then this:



There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate... A true Christian in Hitler's Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God's law it abrogates it's authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation...

Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).

Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad's statements.

Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance."

We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the "progressive" Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post "[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy.' (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/im-already-against-the-n_b_90628.html )

Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

The $3Trillion WAR

You have to read this:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/04/trillion_dollar_war/