Tuesday, December 23, 2003
God and Cookies and Eggnog
One of the things Republicans are good for is entertainment. You never know what kind of wacky thing they'll say next. Take Connecticut governor John Rowland, accused of accepting favors and gifts from businesses in exchange for state contracts, who told a press conference that it's OK because God has told him so. At the same press conference last week, the governor's wife left reporters gasping by reciting a parody of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" that criticized them for biased reporting.
Of course, claiming that the Big Guy is in touch with you, or that you're doing the Big Guy's work down here on Earth no matter how what you're doing might look to fallible human eyes, is fashionable Republican talk right now. Take George W. Bush, for example, who seems to have built an entire theological edifice on which he can do whatever he likes to whomever he likes wherever he likes. But Jim Wallis of the Christian website Sojourners says Bush is continually confusing America's goals with God's goals and his own role with God's role. Wallis' critique is, if nothing else, more proof that nothing is ever as simple as fundamentalists think it is.
Elsewhere in the news, when Bush brought up the subject of tort reform earlier this week, the effect was positively nostalgic. The world has changed so much since September 11, 2001, that the eight months beforehand, the first part of Bush's term, seem like some sort of languid, distant summer. Remember? When the only things we had to worry about were whether he'd start a war with China over the downed spy plane, or if he'd succeed in doing for tort reform in the whole country what he did for it in Texas? It's Bush dogma that frivolous lawsuits are what's driving up the cost of health care, and if we'd just make it harder for people to sue and collect, we'd improve the system a great deal. But just as it was nearly three years ago, that statement remains, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. MoveOn.Org's Daily Misleader reports that the cost of lawsuits as a percentage of health care spending is only about one-half of one percent. The cost of prescription drugs, on the other hand, represents 11 percent of spending and is going up despite the alleged improvements in Bush's Medicare plan.
And finally: We have, as of this moment, lived 48 hours without incident under the latest orange alert, but we may not be off the hook yet. A poster on Reason Online's Hit and Run message board who calls himself "John Ashcroft" reports: "I have credible intelligence indicating that on Wednesday night a man with a beard will be infiltrating targets all around the US. He's planning to evade all of our usual air transportation security mechanisms as he flies from house to house. He'll be delivering packages that have not been screened by security, and he'll be placing them in the vicinity of a highly flammable dead tree found in most homes. Apparently he chose this date for its religious significance. Wednesday and Thursday are the days when people will celebrate the birth of an alleged prophet in the Middle East. Although this prophet was executed as a dangerous subversive two thousand years ago, he still has fanatical followers all around the world. The man delivering these packages is doing it in the name of that prophet. Worse yet, we have reason to believe that various American citizens will act as accessories to his security breaches, leaving out cookies and eggnog for him. I can't stress enough that any American citizen found collaborating with this terrorist will be prosecuted as an enemy combatant. You have been warned."
One of the things Republicans are good for is entertainment. You never know what kind of wacky thing they'll say next. Take Connecticut governor John Rowland, accused of accepting favors and gifts from businesses in exchange for state contracts, who told a press conference that it's OK because God has told him so. At the same press conference last week, the governor's wife left reporters gasping by reciting a parody of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" that criticized them for biased reporting.
Of course, claiming that the Big Guy is in touch with you, or that you're doing the Big Guy's work down here on Earth no matter how what you're doing might look to fallible human eyes, is fashionable Republican talk right now. Take George W. Bush, for example, who seems to have built an entire theological edifice on which he can do whatever he likes to whomever he likes wherever he likes. But Jim Wallis of the Christian website Sojourners says Bush is continually confusing America's goals with God's goals and his own role with God's role. Wallis' critique is, if nothing else, more proof that nothing is ever as simple as fundamentalists think it is.
Elsewhere in the news, when Bush brought up the subject of tort reform earlier this week, the effect was positively nostalgic. The world has changed so much since September 11, 2001, that the eight months beforehand, the first part of Bush's term, seem like some sort of languid, distant summer. Remember? When the only things we had to worry about were whether he'd start a war with China over the downed spy plane, or if he'd succeed in doing for tort reform in the whole country what he did for it in Texas? It's Bush dogma that frivolous lawsuits are what's driving up the cost of health care, and if we'd just make it harder for people to sue and collect, we'd improve the system a great deal. But just as it was nearly three years ago, that statement remains, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. MoveOn.Org's Daily Misleader reports that the cost of lawsuits as a percentage of health care spending is only about one-half of one percent. The cost of prescription drugs, on the other hand, represents 11 percent of spending and is going up despite the alleged improvements in Bush's Medicare plan.
And finally: We have, as of this moment, lived 48 hours without incident under the latest orange alert, but we may not be off the hook yet. A poster on Reason Online's Hit and Run message board who calls himself "John Ashcroft" reports: "I have credible intelligence indicating that on Wednesday night a man with a beard will be infiltrating targets all around the US. He's planning to evade all of our usual air transportation security mechanisms as he flies from house to house. He'll be delivering packages that have not been screened by security, and he'll be placing them in the vicinity of a highly flammable dead tree found in most homes. Apparently he chose this date for its religious significance. Wednesday and Thursday are the days when people will celebrate the birth of an alleged prophet in the Middle East. Although this prophet was executed as a dangerous subversive two thousand years ago, he still has fanatical followers all around the world. The man delivering these packages is doing it in the name of that prophet. Worse yet, we have reason to believe that various American citizens will act as accessories to his security breaches, leaving out cookies and eggnog for him. I can't stress enough that any American citizen found collaborating with this terrorist will be prosecuted as an enemy combatant. You have been warned."
