When Muslim Religious Leaders Finally Grow Up

Today, a Marine was pulled from duty in Iraq for passing out "Christian coins" with the verse from John 3:16 on one side and the words, "Where will you spend eternity?" on the other. (See Fox news story ) A week or two ago, a sniper was pulled from Iraq for (stupidly) using a copy of the Quran for target practice. Even more stupidly,the soldier left it lying in the dust on the target range near the local police station in a former insurgent stronghold. While, I lament the American's actions because his job in this fight is to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people while breaking the will of or converting insurgents and killing unreprentant terrorists, I fail to understand the childishness of the Muslim leader's response. It is always the same with these folks. Throw a pebble, they respond by blowing up babies and invalids in hospitals or shooting up Catholic churches or cutting off Nick Berg's head. Yeah, wouldn't it be great if we could just nuke the folks we dislike off the planet, but a mature response requires that we suck it up, apologize, and try to become friends so we can exploit each other with corporate big business in peace and most especially, prosperity.

Given the nature of our mission in Iraq and the secular nature of our government, I understand why we are responding this way to these infractions of discipline, but in a perfect world, the Marine who passed out the coins would have been given a medal instead--the Sniper, well, for his lack of prudence, maybe a little time back with his family to regroup and get some perspective back in his life.

Muslims are notorious for their publicly over-reactive, ridiculously emotional reponses to these sorts of incidents. They typically respond by shooting up a Catholic Church (as in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002, or the Chaldean Catholic church in Baghdad in Dec 2004), or kill an Archbishop (e.g., Chaldean Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho) when someone who is even nominally Christian, or maybe not, irresponsibly offers the feintest slight because they still believe we are fighting the Crusades. Idiots. Until they learn to grow up and behave like adults instead of like my three year-old whose Hot Wheel car was taken away, these responses are what will always make them look silly, petty, and stupid in the eyes of the world. When I see these things, I feel like I'm playing kindergarten cop. (Actually, correction, my three year old is more mature.)

Let's consider some of the responses of this audience:

(Courtesy Fox News website)..."Demonstrators in Baghdad's Sadr City district chanted 'No to America! No to the occupation!' A statement from al-Sadr's office has called the negotiations 'a project of humiliation for the Iraqi people.'

"Demonstrations?" The Iraqis want us to go away. They obviously have too much time on their hands. Maybe if they spent the time trying to fix their country instead of wasting time demonstrating we wouldn't need to be there.

"A project of 'humiliation?'" Passing out Christian coins on a street corner makes you feel humiliated? What is wrong with you, low self-esteem? Is Islam not fulfilling you adequately enough with self-worth? God created you and willed you be here. This ought to fill you with ample self-worth, not humiliation.

"Al-Zubaie said a man brought one of the coins to a mosque on Wednesday to show it to him and other Sunni leaders." This is like my three year old telling me that his older brother broke his 50 cent toy. Want to solve the problem? Why don't you ask China to make you bigger coins and give it to your people on the next street corner.

"One anti-U.S. Iraqi Sunni group condemned the Quran shooting, calling it 'a hideous act.'" He accused the Marines of trying to do missionary work in Fallujah and said Sunni leaders had met with U.S. military officials and demanded "the harshest punishment" for those responsible to make sure it doesn't happen again. What is more hideous are grown men acting like their shorts were pulled down on the kindergarten playground and crying to the principal about it. Oh? So, you demand the harshest punishment for an immature 19 year old who shoots an inanimate object, but you don't even bat an eyelash at your own 30 year old man who takes multiple human lives in the name of God and then blasphemously claims he is doing it FOR God? My apologies if I do not empathize with your pain.

Maybe if our Muslim terrorist extremists would act with a little more maturity and condemn something that really ought to be condemned, like abortion, pedophilia, torture of political prisoners (it's OK for liberals), then I might be willing to join you in your condemnation frenzy. A word of advice, grow up.

To Keep and Bear Arms

The forever debate between revisionists and traditionalists on the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution has swirled around the issue of whether "to keep and bear arms" refers to an individual right or a collective one. If it is a collective one, then, I suppose it was orginally intended as a legal mechanism for the local colonial militia to store arms in a local armory so that in case of immediate attack, someone could go and wake up the armorer so he can fumble around for his keys in the middle of the unlit night until he arrives at the armory to issue weapons and ammunition to the local minutemen--whose job, then, I guess, was to arrive at the collective armory in under one minute so that weapons could be issued in time to fend off an immediate attack by, say, the local Indians who would patiently wait for everyone to show up armed.

If you are Marine veteran, like me, than that sounds about like any morning before you drew weapons, doesn't it. I suppose it was no different back in the revolution either, when, the National Guard, (i.e., the "militia") like me, in my day, spent countless mornings waiting two hours or more on line for the armorer to issue me my personal weapon. Clearly, then, like those who interpret the right as a collective right, can see that the idea of the "minuteman" was not to get the average citizen to the fight before the enemy arrived in force, but out to the local armory so that he, too, could wait in line for several hours while the armorer checked the serial number of each weapon against his data in the armorer's book...after he spent half the morning looking for the keys he misplaced since the last time he opened the armory. Of course, ammunition issue is a separate issue that we won't go into here, except to wonder at how we can expect responsible citizens to keep ammunition and firearms together if we cannot even expect that highly trained, responsible professional soldiers and Marines to not accidentally load ammunition into weapons placed on safe without magazines.

Of course, I am being facetious. I have to say that I am being facetious because some of my readers will take my ridicule of our over-redundant safety procedures at face value. These safety measures are meant to circumvent a lack of common sense which we can no longer take for granted. (I have learned the hard way that common sense is no longer common or sensible. Many people say, think, and do stupid things today. It has become an epidemic. In fact, if 51% of the nation considers themselves "liberal", than it is a fair statement to say that just over half the nation fits in the "lacks common sense" category. These are the same people who will not believe in the existence of God, or that Jesus (the Christ) was actually a historical figure and not the figment of a bunch of early Christians' imaginations--how can there be "Christ"-ians if there is no "Christ"?--but who believe in UFOs which, after nearly half a century of life, I still haven't seen.

But I digress. What is not reflected upon in the 2nd amendment debate is the purpose of an amendment that is separate from the constitutional establishment of the local militia. The second amendment establishes the right to keep and bear arms. Why would the issue of arms even come up in the first place if it was not meant as an individual right? England and every European nation at the time had armies, ARMED--isn't that the point of an ARMy? Why would something so obvious need to be stated in our constitution? The constitution established both a militia and an Army separate from the 2nd amendment. Furthermore, the militia would be made up of "the people," armed with their personally owned firearms, while the Army would have its own standing federal armories. The militia, i.e., "the people" whose individual right it is to own and bear arms, was purposely left to remain in place precisely to be able to fight off the tyranny of OUR OWN government--if it came to that (See West's Encyclopedia of American Law, Vol.I, "Armed Services"). This idea was part of the radical uniqueness of "the American experiment". Private ownership of firearms by the masses was part of what was new and different about America that no other nation permitted. Stalin used disinformation and deceit to disarm the Chechens before he rounded up their population and sent them off to Sibera. Hitler did the same to his people once he took office. So did the Chinese communists once they took power.

Liberal ideologues in our own nation still actively seek to disarm our population, I guess, because we're all grown up now in 2008, and we no longer need anyone but the government to "protect" us. This is the same government that the 51% described above believe concocted 9-11 in order to justify the war in Iraq. Yes, the very same G.W. Bush who is not smart enough to win the war in Iraq, was somehow smart enough to concoct all the details of 9-11 with the same help he has in Iraq now. But I digress again. (It's hard not too on this subject because it's all related.)

The trite arguments hold true. Statistics continue to bear out that the cities with the strictest gun laws still have the highest crime rates. (I give you Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, PA, who between the two of them, have had more private citizens killed per year through murder than the number of U.S. casualties in all of Iraq in one year. Add NYC and Philadelphia together, and more U.S. citizens are murdered in those two cities than there are U.S. killed in two years of fighting in Iraq! The streets of Iraq are safer than NYC and Philadelphia combined.) Far from turning the nation into Dodge City, law-abiding citizens who are allowed to "keep" and "bear" arms, have kept crime rates down. The formula is simple. The Founding Fathers knew it. Let's stick with what history has shown works. Let the Second Amendment remain as an individual right as it was intended until the Lord comes to beat our swords into plowshares.

Why Iraq Matters

If you are like the rest of mainstream America, you have probably asked the very valid question of why we are still involved in Iraq. Many influential people with much greater intelligence than me believe we should never have gotten involved in the first place. After all, what was the real threat? A penny ante dictator with a mythical cache of WMD who loved to sword-rattle and got a kick out of high stakes brinksmanship? Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni was one of many well-placed individuals who knew that Iraq did in fact have WMD--at least prior to our 2003 invasion--and possessed the capability to quickly convert its conventional weapons to WMD wielding capability. However, by the time of the invasion, it is the going thinking that Saddam had successfully removed his WMDs out of the country and no longer appeared a threat. I will not challenge this assertion, though it is clear that he did in fact possess some weapons of mass destruction at the time of our invasion.

If I am not mistaken, the whole point of WMD possession is that one does not need to have a lot of it to be a threat. So, why no one was excited over the fact we found any is still a mystery to me. Well, not really. The fact is that the media did not want to highlight anything that would make their agenda look bad. O.K., so Hussein did not appear to have as much as, say, China or North Korea, but should we not be concerned that Hussein had any at all, especially since he had already demonstrated he would use them, say, against the Iranians (1980) and the Kurds (1990)?

What, I will challenge, however, is that although Saddam Hussein did not appear to be a massive threat on the world stage, he had already proven that he could upset the stability in the middle east (invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia 1990). It is clear, as well, that he was not afraid to launch weapons against Israel (1990). Still, all that seems to have been forgotten by all. Same country. Same dictator. Same madman. Different year. Now it longer matters?

Did we emasculate Hussein's ability to continue the WMD threat prior to 2003? Could we have taken a more limited approach to dealing with Saddam Hussein, say, conduct an air campaign and leave it at that (as we did in Dec 1998)? Would this not have saved lives, kept stability in the terroristic world of Iraq, and maintained our goal of regional stability in the middle east? Can it be argued that by occupying Iraq, all we did was create an insurgency that is now focused more than it would have been prior to our invasion of Iraq? While I won't say the answer is a blanket, "no", I do believe the answer remains a qualified "no". Those who buy these arguments fail to consider the misery of the lives of the many in Iraq and in many other areas of the world (like China, North Vietnam, North Korea) who do not even experience the freedom to speak out against their oppression. (No, Virgina, contrary to Dan Brown's bizarre beliefs, the Catholic Church does not hold its adherents hostage and show up in the middle of the night to torture us on the rack if we hold heretical beliefs...even though that's the way I would do it. It's just a darned good thing that I am not Pope. All that was 500 years ago, and it was mostly laws created by corrupt Catholic politicians with the approval of bad bishops...kind of like what anti-life, John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi are to our Congress and what Archbishop Weakland was to Milwaukee and Bishop Hubbard is to the diocese of Albany today. Time to get over it. So, what's Islam's problem?)

It seems to have been forgotten that in Dec 1998, President Clinton, by a change of administration policy, officially sought to remove Saddam Hussein from office. The only difference between Clinton and President Bush on this point is that President Bush got the job done. Clinton tried to do it hurling laser guided missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and other pinpoint weapons against Hussein, but failed to remove him. Obviously, a bombing campaign was not going to work. Oops, CNN forgot to remind us of that, didn't they.

As Americans, what we hear from CNN are pat, party-line soundbites by people whom CNN finds to say what they want them to say or cannot say otherwise for fear that, for example, a Hussein Terror Squad would show up at their door in the middle of the night, steal them away to some sweat box in the desert, and slowly torture them to death. (Has the reader ever seen the video clips of the terror squads forcing their victims to blow themselves up with hand grenades?) Why hasn't the media shown us these clips? Because the media, in its agenda against all things Bush, doesn't want us to see the ugly side of life in these countries. Oh, don't get me wrong, life is grand in these places so long as one disavows a Catholic or other Christian faith. Truth doesn't matter so long as one stays distracted with material things and entertainment and all the things that don't lead us to focus on the eternal nature of things we will all one day face when we pass from this life. Things that God desires for us, that is, the Truth about how we ought to live our lives and the true peace it would bring us if we truly lived it in Christ Jesus.

So, then, why does Iraq matter? It matters because the people of Iraq matter. It matters because freedom matters---at least the freedom to explore another reality than what Islam has to offer. It matters because Christ taught us that God wants all of us to know true freedom and live in true peace, not in a forced religious context, but because we have chosen it for ourselves in freedom. If we become Catholic, it is because the faith has resonated with the depths of our souls in a profound relationship with Jesus Christ, not because it has been forced upon us. God calls us to live freely to be able to discern the fullness of truth, but that truth cannot be found in fear and oppression.

I am not saying that Catholic Church knows or possesses all truth, but rather that it has the assurance from Jesus Christ that of all the ontological truth that God has revealed to us, it is best known through what he has revealed to the Church. Nor am I saying that sciences and other disciplines have nothing to offer, for rather the opposite is true. It is a matter of Catholic teaching and belief that the Holy Spirit is constantly revealing new things to mankind (cf. the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes). To explain this further is a long and complicated discussion which goes outside the scope of this article, so I will not discuss it further here. The main point is that regardless of how secular critics judge the overthrow of the Hussein government, and America's intervention thereof, it was morally the right thing to do. Separate is the issue of whether our present course of action to restore peace and stability in Iraq is the right means to that end. That issue is highly debatable, and I leave it to greater minds than mine to settle that question. On this point, I do believe there are many legitimate criticisms of the Bush administration, including whether President Bush well-scrutinized the post-invasion course of action using all the right people or not, or whether there even was a well-thought out plan for restoring the balance of power. What should remain uncontested, however, is the moral rightness of removing despots from power---Kim Il Sung take note.

The problem of allowing Iraq to continue to repress its people from the exploration or discovery of other faiths remains. At issue is that its constitution takes as its principles the laws of the Koran. One can argue that U.S. law takes its principles from the ten commandments. However, while the Old Testament of the Bible advocates the slaying of those who offend God, Jesus Christ supplants the law of "eye for an eye" with "turn the other cheek". (In fact, in Catholic interpretive principles of the bible, the Old testament is always read and interpreted in light of the Gospels and the New Testament.) On the other hand, while more moderate adherents of Islam profess toleration of other religions, the Koran does not. The Koran has no New Testament written by Mohammed that in any way corrects his edict that the infidel that does not submit to Islam must die. In fact, he orders death for those who will not "submit" to the faith. Osama Bin Laden and all the other Jihadists are merely taking their religion to its logical conclusion. Thus, it is not possible for those who profess Islam in a government that uses the Koran for the basis of its law, at least in a rigid interpretation, to explore the freedom of the Catholic faith or any other form of Christianity. This remains the problem with the more fundamental sects of Islam who remain in power in Iraq. It would be one thing if Islamic leaders would allow a true toleration for the proliferation of other faiths, but Islamists precisely fear this expansion of belief as a threat to their way of life. Even in more moderate countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, Catholics are politically and socially marginalized, and at least mildly persecuted.

I am saddened to say, however, that these Islamic leaders have a legitimate concern, because while the nature of the Catholic faith, when practiced at its essence (i.e., "let man have dominion over the earth" where dominion is interpreted as "stewardship", cf. Gen 1:26) would lend itself to the simplicity of life and culture so rightly desired by Muslims, the Protestant Christian traditional interpretation sees in this passage a license to exploit the resources of the world for one's personal benefit (i.e., dominion interpreted as exploitation). This is not to say that the Catholic Church has always understood dominion as stewardship, for obviously it has not. Yet, as Christ stated in John 14:26 that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church to all truth (via the apostles), so has this idea of stewardship vs. exploitation been an ever greater emerging concept in the Church since the time of Francis of Assisi (1192-1222 A.D.). (Thus, it is ironic here that it was St. Francis of Assisi himself who brokered the peace deal between the Sultan and the Catholic Crusaders in July 1219 which ended the fifth crusade. The Sultan was so impressed by Francis's humility that he saw the truth lived genuinely in Francis. It was because of that peace deal, that it is the Franciscans and only the Franciscans whom, to this day, the Muslims allow to have the charge of the Catholic quarter of the crucifixion site of Jesus Christ in the Holy Land. Maybe, we ought to let the Franciscans broker the peace in Iraq.) Thus, the versions of Christianity that are understood by Muslims today are either the outdated Crusading Catholics of 300 years ago, or the exploitative resource for personal gain version understood by a waning mainstream Protestant community in contemporary America. Far from either of these is the reality is that the United States exists in a post-Christian condition where our values are drawn from a secular media culture that pervades every aspect of our lives. Parents who often are too permissive or who obviously see no moral problem with the culture let the problematic elements of the culture raise their children. Our culture is then exported via internet and satellite television to the rest of the world, which, in the case of those cultures and peoples that still have some semblance of a moral compass in terms of family rebel against it, and thus movements like the Taliban are generated and embraced.

So, does this mean we are supposed to give up and go home from Iraq because we cannot get it right? No, because even though our culture has many problematic elements, and is in many ways, truly a lost culture, the one thing we have is the freedom to be what we are--something that Iraq still does not have. A careful reading of the nature of God, as revealed in the books of both the Old and New testaments, will reveal the one law that God himself will not violate is the freedom he gave to mankind.

Gigantor Revisited

This is a mindless post, so don't waste your time reading it unless you really want to know what Gigantor was. If you're still with me, then here goes.

If you are a late-stage Baby-Boomer (i.e., born between 1956 and 1962), you probably watched an eclectic and long-forgotten animated TV series entitled "Gigantor". I hear this word a lot these days---the latest word zeitgeist I suppose. In the recent comedic blockbuster, "Night at the Museum," it is an epithet Owen Wilson bestows upon Ben Stiller during a heated exchange in the diorama. "Gigantor" was also one of my nicknames as a kid because my last name pronounced in its native Ukrainian somehow reminded the local village idiot of the word. (Explanatory note: The local village idiot, whose last name sounded like, "lunkhead," but whom I shall simply call, "Moe"--cf. Calvin and Hobbes---of whom we had several in our neighborhood growing up, couldn't even pronounce his own two syllable last name let alone a three syllable name of Ukrainian origin. Anyway, the epithet turned out to be prophetic, because at my present height, I tend to tower over most people like Gigantor did. (Moe was not being clever. Moe did not have brains. Suffice it to say at the time I knew Moe, I was a peanut.) You can also find the word used in hundreds of internet sites, but try to find anything on the original animated TV series and you get zilch. Amazing. What happened to it? Anyone out there with that knowledge please feel free to comment with an answer.

So who or what was Gigantor? Well, if you're still with me, I'll continue. In the big scheme of things it's a pointless subject and maybe that is why it has been forgotten, but then again, so was Spiderman, but that hasn't been. In any case, I am setting the record straight for posterity. Besides, if people actually care about Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and OJ, then they have to care about Gigantor who is at least as relevant and ranks right up there in order of importance, and as history has shown has been as influential.

As mentioned above, Gigantor was an animated TV series that aired in the mid-1960's that featured a huge robot, named, you guessed it, Gigantor. The cartoon series had its own catchy theme song, the tune of which I have since long forgotten. The robot, which I have heard was green in color from spoiled kids who had colored TV during that era (a rarity then...most of us had black & whites), and it also had its nemesis, a black robot, the name of which I have also forgotten, was equally as huge and was always causing Gigantor trouble. I also recall there was this boy character who had befriended Gigantor and was always being saved by Gigantor...actually, they were more like a team. My nine year-old son tells me that idea of the series "sounds a lot like "Transformers", which tells me that Transformers was probably a re-make of the Gigantor series with a different name.

That's all I remember. Everything else is shady. After all, I was only three at the time. Maybe someone in Hollywood with more financial resources than me will make a non-animated movie version of the former Gigantor TV series. Although, I would be happy if Liketelevision.com would be able to find the series buried somewhere in an archive and post it for watching on the internet--for free. If you happen to find a link somewhere in cyberspace that can offer more details on this all-important subject, feel free to leave a comment. Now you can use the word, "Gigantor", with some knowledge of its origins. And you thought it was just a cool word that some surfer dude in California made up. Not.


Post Script: Thanks to CrewCon for setting me straight on Gigantor's correct spelling, and for bringing back memories that were long forgotten in watching a clip from the series on YouTube.

God: Male or Female?

In today's society where everyone creates God in his or her own image and likeness, the real deep thinkers in the world, that would be the religion writers in scholarly magazines like Newsweek and Time (I'm being facetious), inevitably bring up the profound philosophical question (I'm still being facetious): Is God male or female?

This question, truly pondered for minutes at a time by tremendous scholars, like the religion writers of Newsweek and Time, is perhaps among the most arrogant, selfishly based, if not incredibly vapid questions of the modern age. The reason is because the question presumes that God is made in the image and likeness of humans--which are differentiated in two varieties: male and female. These bright shining lights of theological genious apparently have never stopped to think that if God is a differentiated being like a male or female, then humans are God. If humans are God, then God does not exist because the created cannot create the Creator. We do it all the time--which says something of our own incredible stupidity for a race so intelligent. One of the many paradoxes of Man, I guess.

What is forgotten when we insist on isolating God into a differentiated human being is that when we speak of God, human words cannot adequately explain his Being. The baby-boomers are an amazing testament to how public education dumbed down America. So, for all these guys and especially its gals, my beloved peers, we need to talk about language here and its use in Sacred Scripture. Hopefully, I can make some sense out of this for any of you who thinks God has a gender.

When, in the English language, we use masculine-based words to describe God, it is not because he is "male" or even "masculine" in the human sense of the English word. For if God was only male, he could not have created femaleness. For someone to make something, one has to know in intimate detail what one is making. With what perfection must one know something One is creating? (Strictly speaking, only God can create. The verb "to create", in its true meaning, means bringing into being something from nothing--not even pre-existing ideas or the products of thought. For even a work of art comes from some thought that has been pre-conceived from ideas learned or taught. Even abstract art is merely the product of the artist's nurturing, and the material the artist uses is a pre-created product. Even abstract forms have pre-existent patterns somewhere in the universe either at micro or macroscopic levels.) In the English language, the use of masculine specific language when applied to God has been relatively only recently considered "sexist", and so, a strong push, which has even infected to some degree, the Catholic Church (at least in America where this kind of hyper-sensitive silliness reigns supreme among hyper-hysterical females and intellectually dishonest males who seem to have the need to control every aspect of everyone else's lives) to eliminate the language of "male" when referring to God is still running amok in some circles.

Nowhere in the 73 books that make up the Catholic bible (there are only 66 books in Protestant version--this version "corrected" by Pope Martin Luther I, 1,524 years after Christ, and only 1,131 years after the Catholic Church approved the recognized list or "canon" of Scripture) is the word "male" or "man" used in reference to God, EXCEPT as where it pertains to Jesus the Christ who had to come to earth as someone, and God the "Father" chose a man so as to, in part, parallel the creation of "Adam" who is theologically credited with the Fall of Man(kind), even though it was female Eve who let the Serpent talk her into eating the fruit first. (The study of this is rich with theological depth and too long to go into here. The bottom line is that since God created Adam before Eve, Adam is given responsibility for her. Furthermore, Adam lets Eve talk him into eating the fruit. Catholic teaching ponders that if Adam had not taken the fruit, and had chastised Eve for her actions instead, there would would not have been a need for the Messiah--yet, anyway.) The word, "Father" as it refers to God, though a masculine term, can only be used by analogy. The English word for "father", ultimately derives from the meaning of the semitic term used for God as "Abba" or "Daddy"--the word a young child would use toward its father, and not the other way around. That is, the very notion of a "father" comes from the biblical idea of who God is in his fatherly sense. Furthermore, when the Messiah comes along to reveal for all of humankind who God is, he reveals this first person of the Holy Trinity as "Father" in all that that word means, not in its human sense, but in its derived sense. Jesus allows himself the limited nature of human language, and uses the word that best describes who he knows his Father to be, and chooses the word, "Father." "Mother" didn't cut it. Why? Because though a mother's authority in a semitic family setting, that is, Jesus' audience, is profound, it was not absolute. In the ideal family, the mother influences the father's decision making, but the father is still charged by God himself with making the final decision. Like Adam, it is the male head of the family who is ultimately going to be held accountable first and foremost for one's family. That is not to absolve the mother. Remember the hardships brought on Eve as a result of her sin (see Genesis 4). (Whether or not the story of Adam and Eve is literal or not--and who is to say it isn't, were you there?--is not at issue here. The point is that God's Word--i.e., the collection of 73 writings we call the Bible--is God's self-revelation to us through the imperfect instrument of the human author.

Strictly speaking all language that refers to God can only be used by analogy. The Uncreated precedes his Creation. No language can adequately express his profundity. Yet, God's revealed Word, that is, as expressed in Sacred Scriptures, comes to us in time. Specifically, in precise moments in history that prescind from the political correctness of language as used today. He could have chosen to inspire human authors of today's ilk, but he did not. We have to ask his purpose in doing so. And the answer has to include the use of language as it was understood by his historical audience. Authentic bible scholars and translators, who are truly seeking God, and not pushing political agendas or allowing themselves to be bound by the fleeting zeitgeist of political correctness, will be inspired by the Holy Spirit to continue to authentically translate the biblical texts in such a way as to preserve their integrity. So, we cannot take a words like "Father" or "Son" when they refer to the Godhead, and plaster them haphazardly into our American lexicon and expect to make sense of God. When we do, we start taking offense for inane reasons at the language used to describe God by the biblical authors. Words like "Him", "He"," Father" are not to be confused with "maleness" or "masculinity" when referring to God. Rather, our understanding and use of the words Him, He, His and Father, are mere shadows as to the fullness of what these words convey when applied to the Divine Nature. Perhaps the best analogy for this can described in terms of Plato's "forms", where for everything that exists on earth, the perfection of what that thing is exists in some other plane. The words we use here are mere shadows of what is meant when expressed by the Holy Spirit through the inspired authors of the Scriptures. These authors are bound by the limited nature of words which can never express the reality of God. So, if our father has miserably failed to live up to the ideal of what a "father" is supposed to be in the eyes of God who personifies Father in its ideal, what has that to do with the English language? Therefore, to try to apply language to God that he himself did not reveal to us is theologically short-sighted and a failure of scholarly thought.

So, then, why not use feminine epithets or gender-neutral language? Why does the language have to be masculine? Because, like it or not, that is the reality of the theological language of the bible. That is the language God inspired the human instrument to use in his self-revelation to humankind. This does not, therefore make God masculine or "male" in the human sense of the word. Rather, all that is feminine in Sacred Scripture comes from that which is masculine. This does not make the masculine superior. Masculinity by itself does not complete humanity. However, the mystery of humankind as expressed in the story of Adam and Eve is that somehow, in human creation, God makes man (as sex) first and female is drawn from him. Adam by himself does not complete the human complementarity. The Genesis scripture does not say Adam was lonely or even wanted a companion, it rather states that, "the Lord God said, 'It is not good for man to be alone.'" (Gen 2:18). Only when he draws woman from man, is "man" complete. This is expressed linguistically when it is written, "God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him (singular), male and female he created them (plural)". (Gen 1:27)

Neither feminine titles or gender-neutral language can describe God as well as the language that the Holy Spirit inspired the biblical authors to use. Yes, there are limited occasions when God is spoken of in feminine terms--in fact, I think it is like, once, in the psalms. However, rather than using a feminine epithet, it his deep love of us that is described in maternal language. This is perfectly adequate because every human being who knew his or her mother understands the language of the love of a mother. Furthermore, God could not have created Woman if he did not intimately know every detail of the feminine and its psychological and spiritual make-up.

This brings us back to the above discussion on the timing of God's inspiration and the moment in history in which he sends his Son, Jesus, the Messiah. God sent his "Son" Jesus in time, that is, a specific moment in history. Jesus' mission is to reveal the profound depth of the Love of God, his Father, for his creation (cf Jn 1:18; 10,29-30). To do this, God sends his "Word-made-flesh", that is, his Son, Jesus, to reveal the Father and to die for the salvation of Man (in the sense of humankind). God could have chosen anytime to do this. He could have chosen 21st century America. He didn't. He chose the times when and the culture where male patriarchy reigned supreme. He did this for a reason. We can only presume that his timing is what it was, in order to best reveal his own divine nature to us. The same is true with the writings of the bible. He didn't inspire present day authors to write the 73 books of the bible. Those 73 books are spread out over the course of 2000 years (No other religious book is like that--all other religious texts are written by one author in a fixed moment of history. I point this out because the implications of the relative consistency of the 73 texts are not much short of miraculous).

Does this make God some sort of androgynous being, some sort of she-male hybrid? To think in these terms is juvenile at best and sophomoric at worst. God is completely other, yet is our very creator and knows us individually in every initimate detail--better than our DNA defines us (inasmuch as he designed that, too!). The desire of feminists in our country to express God in female terms stems from a profound failure in their personal family lives, which they then want to project upon all families, and so they desire to control every aspect of everyone else's lives, the liturgy all others attend, the language all others use. Ultimately, this controlling desire simply boils down to psychological brokenness manifested in the childish selfishness that they never grew out of as kids. Welcome to our age.

So, where is the feminine found in God? Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, is the perfection of human womanhood. Her role comes secondary to Christ, like Eve's comes secondary to Adam's. Yet, her role is essential to humankind's salvation. Without her cooperation with the Divine, there is no salvation, because if she had made excuses to God, she would have denied humanity its savior. God chose Mary, in her womanly role as receiver (Lk 1:28, Jn 19:26,27), as initiator of love in action(Lk 1:39ff), as intercessor and counselor (Jn 2:5). Her "political" role as "Queen" and "Mother" is clearly seen in Rev 12:1ff, and in Psalm 45. She is also the archetype of the Church, which is referred to in feminine terms, because she "receives" the favors, graces, gifts, love, salvation and all else from God, specifically, from Jesus, who is the Bridegroom of the Church (Rev 21). The Church is the "bride" who is to prepare to meet her Bridegroom at the end of time. In this collective sense, even men are in a feminine role. Christ is the ultimate male. God the Father is the ultimate in what it means to be Father, even as Mary is the ultimate woman. Yet, she is to moon as God is to Sun. Her light only exists as the reflection of the outside source who is God. This is true of ALL mankind, men and women. Thus, the language of male and female in its every aspect in the bible is distinguished by a necessary complementarity of roles, necessarily to which, the female role is subjugated, but in no way less important than the role of man.

In the end, human language simply cannot grasp the reality of God, even as that which is finite can never encapsulate the infinite. If you feel you have to call God "she", feel free to do so if that makes you happy, but don't foist it on the rest of us, try to convice the rest of us with the wounded logic of human psychological baggage, or try to control theological orthodoxy with faulty opinion, and lastly, know that your reality of God is less than what God himself has enabled you to understand.

Oy Vay! A Merry Christmas?!

O.K., this may seem a stretch, and in the hyper-sensitivity which spews out of our culture like so much manure from a cow, this is likely to offend, but if it does, the reader needs to chill out because he is over-reacting. The bombing of the WTC is something to get upset about, not the fact someone is making a sincere comment to you in good faith.

So, it's the Christmas Season again. No, just because it is Dec 30th, Christmas is not over. Liturgically speaking, the season does not traditionally end until the feast of the Epiphany; you know, the story of the visitation of the three wise men who go to King Herod to inquire of the birth of the Messiah which takes Herod by surprise, so he decides to kill all the baby Jewish boys in his Kingdom two years and under in an attempt to kill the infant Messiah, which he doesn't get because Jesus' foster father, Joseph is warned in a dream by an angel to beat feet to Egypt and wastes no time in heeding the warning. Yeah, that story. The Epiphany, of course, is traditionally celebrated on January 6th giving the Christmas season its "12 days".

But what I really want to propose in this post is an open invitation to my Jewish brethren to celebrate Christmas. What!? You say. Has this Gentile gone mad!? Perhaps, but hear me out. Christians celebrate the birth of the Messiah which, in their minds, occurred 2000 plus years ago. Now, Christians anticipate the return of the crucified and risen Savior of the World. However, their Jewish friends also await the Messiah. They believe when he comes, he will come in power and glory as foretold by the prophets in their common Sacred Scriptures. Jews and Christians must concede that both faiths will unite at the moment of the Messiah's coming because Christians will recognize the Christ of 2000 years ago come back as promised and their brethren Jews will unmistakably recognize the Messiah whom they missed at that time come in power and glory as their prophets foretold he would 2000 years ago.

So isn't Christmas really a celebration of the Messiah whether he was born 2000 years ago or whether he will one day return in glory? In the Holy Scripture readings of the Advent season, i.e., the four weeks leading up to Christmas day, the Old testament readings of the daily Divine Liturgy are the readings of the Jewish Scriptures which foretell the coming of the Messiah.1 As a Catholic, I can easily celebrate Hannukah because the story of Judas Maccabeus is part of our Old testament tradition. However, as Jewish feasts figure in the Jewish calendar, Hannukah is relatively minor and the only reason it has taken on popularity (which by the way has only been in the last 35 years or so...the same period in which the liberal movement in our country became so entrenched in our culture) is because of our hyper-political sensitivity which needed a Jewish holiday in proximity to Christmas so that advertisers could ensure that Jews take part in the commercialization of the season as well (OK, hyper-sensitive ones, this is NOT a racist statement, stay with me on this). So, I have no problem making Hanukkah the "Celebration of Lights" that it is, but at the present time, let's face it, the meaning of Hannukah has been completely prescinded from its origin. It has really become an excuse for a Jewish Christmas. If you really think about this, the logic behind it is embarassing. If you are celebrating Hannukah as a substitute for Christmas, you might as well be celebrating "Festivus" or some other made up holiday like Kwanzaa (Another excuse for a Christmas substitute so that pagan Africans can open presents on Christmas morning. I mean, really, someone needs to wake up the masses and tell the Emperor he isn't wearing any clothes here.)

OK, so what is the fix? Well, what REALLY needs to happen is that practicing Jews must reclaim their Messianic hope. If they missed the Messiah 2000 years ago, or simply cannot believe that Jesus was that Messiah, this should not stop their celebration of a true Christmas. The very idea of a Messiah is theirs in the first place. The first Christians were Jews. Christmas as Christians celebrate it celebrate the birth of whom they believe to have been the Messiah 2000 years ago, but they are also celebrating his eventual promised return.2 For Jews, this Second Coming will correspond to his First Coming for them. Even the Christian Scriptures (specifically, St. Paul in the New testament, as does the Catholic Church today) proclaims that salvation which is the Messiah's reconciliation of mankind to God due to the sin of Adam, is given "to the Jew first then the Gentile." Neither Christians nor Jews will mistake that return in glory. This is not only "common ground" but a true bond which unites Christians and Jews in faith. So, to my faithful Jewish friends, a Happy Hannukah, and a Merry Christmas to you.

Footnotes: (1) Incidentally, the timing of these readings coincide with the Jewish celebration of Hannukah, although this feast has less to do with the Messiah than it does with the predilection of the Chosen People of Yahweh at the time of Maccabeus. Now, it is true that some of these Scriptures were only found in the Greek "Septuagint" manuscripts and the Jewish Council of Jamnia which met in 100 A.D. used in its criteria for determining the authenticity of their Scriptures that what was found in the Septuagint must also have been found in the extant Hebrew manuscripts or it was not to be regarded as "inspired" of God. Unfortunately, this criteria was prejudicial to the fact that the many Hebrew scriptures that would have corroborated the Greek Old testament writings had been destroyed during the Babylonian destruction Jersusalem and of the Temple in 574 B.C. Copies of extant Hebrew texts corroborating the Greek were simply not to be found. What is more pertinent here is that it is highly unlikely the Hebrew scribes (copyists) writing in Greek just made up new chapters of Holy Scriptures to amuse themselves. A fortiori, dubious additional criteria that prejudiced the Council members against the obvious prophesies which came way too uncomfortably close to the reality of the life and fate of Jesus of Nazareth and against the pesky Jewish "sect" called "Christians" by the Romans ensured that the Scripture texts such as the suffering servant passages of Isaiah did not make the cut. Yet, for the previous 525 years, these writings did make the cut and were proclaimed from the Synagogues of that age.)

(2) The word, "Christ" or "Kristos" is Greek for Messiah or Messhiacha which is Hebrew. Thus the word and concept of the "Christ" is synonomous with "Messiah".

Sean Bell's Real Tragedy

The recent shooting of Sean Bell in New York city outside a strip club in New York does not so much highlight problems with the police, as much as deeper problems in the mentality of inner city African-American culture. This whole issue is a reminder of a similar tragic shooting just before Easter in Cincinnati in 2000 which gained national attention and the same emotion-driven lack of logic on the part of the inner city African-American culture across America.

In that shooting, a 17 year-old black youth with 14 unpaid parking tickets and other violations was being questioned by a rookie cop during a routine traffic violation. The young man panicked and took off running into a dark alley despite commands from the policeman to stop. Instead of doing what any reasonable person would do by actually LISTENING and ACTING UPON the commands of the policeman, the youth, now in the dark alley, appeared to put his hands under his shirt as if to pull out, what? His bellybutton? Yeah, apparently the cop thought so, too. So, naturally, the bellybutton of a black inner-city youth from a drug ridden area of Cincinnati being a weapon of mass destruction gave cause for the cop to shoot him. Of course the cop shot him. Any normal person with right-minded logic would have entertained the thought the possible gang member from the local gang-ridden community was pulling out a gun. The real question is why didn't the youth do what the cop asked in the first place? If it is perfectly natural for an inner-city black youth to run from a cop, then PARENTS, TELL YOUR KIDS NOT TO DO THAT because it might mean their life. Don't blame it on the cops. The responsibility of the death of your children for stupidity, if you didn't teach them otherwise is yours.

Fast forward to the scene outside a New York strip club. Yeah, the great tradition of stupid males who apparently think that a good preparation for marriage is to hire a stripper, go to a strip club, or have sex with a prostitute the night before they are to be married apparently bit our boy Sean Bell and two of his friends in the behind. Tragically, truly tragically, Bell was killed. It's tragic because he was unprepared to meet his Maker. No, it's no "crime" to be outside a strip club, but it sure as heck was a serious sin to be in one--let alone on the night before one is supposed to engage in a lifelong chaste relationship with your only true love. O.K., let's put the obvious aside. Let's look at a more telling fact that more people can agree on: It is a crime to ram a police car, and it is not too smart to use words like "gun" when you are around a cop who is informing you that you are under arrest. Nor is it very bright if you make motions to aggravate the police when they start issuing commands. Apparently, Rodney King, the youth from Cincinnati, and now Sean Bell and two of Bell's friends didn't have enough brains to figure that out. So, Darwin wins again. This is not about race. This is about common sense and the serious lack of it that issues from the inner-city, African-American, gansta-rap culture.

The real tragedy of Bell's death is not that he was shot and killed, but that his life was a rejection of God's love. God will judge him in the totality of who Bell was, complete with the disadvantages he faced growing up, and not being God, it not my place to condemn the poor guy to eternity in Hell, but is the lesson here racism or is it, rather, long overdue that the inner-city hip-hop, gangsta rap culture take a serious look at their culture of death and self-destruction and consider a life of faith in a God who opens his arms, enough to die on a cross of a miserable crucifixion by subjecting himself to the ignorance of Neanderthal punks like Bell and his ilk for love of each one of them?

No race is superior over another, and being a white guy, anyone who makes this post about race is a blind fool. Heaven knows that every race has its Einsteins and its idiots. The caucasian race is chock full of them. Hell, we have a whole world full of them--we call them, "Liberals". Rather, it is that Christianity, and specifically the Catholic faith (1500 years before Luther) highly influenced the caucasian world of western and northern Europe. For all the many human faults of the Church, its best part, that is its Divine influence, brought out the best in humankind. (The wars in the name of Christianity are not at issue here. These were due to the fallen nature of man, not the principles of Christianity if fallen man had followed them. The crusades were brought about by aggressive and violent Muslim incursions into Catholic Europe and the Middle East. Compare Christian principles to the principles of Islam, where Jihad is the method of conversion or death for failure to be of Muslim belief.) When has the African-American community best flourished in the world? When it has embraced Christ who is God of all mankind. Look at Martin of Tours, Peter Claver, Cyprian Michael Tansi, Charles Randolph Uncles who are just a few exmaples of men elevated to Saints or who were pioneers in the Catholic Church. Then, there are the secular examples of men like Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver who, though not Catholic, still embraced Christ.

The inner-city African-American culture of death, led by Malcom X in the 1960's, argues that Christianity is not an authentically black religion. Well, heck, Malcolm, Jesus wasn't white either you ignoramus. He was a Middle-Eastern Jew--probably olive skinned. White people have no more claim to Christianity than any other race on the planet. Most of white Europe embraced it as an alien faith. The premises of Malcolm X's argument is false. As a result, he and those who follow his thinking, set back the inner-city black community 40 years in their social development. All the government programs in the world won't solve it either. Mr. Obama, our fraudulently elected President, hasn't either. It is not until a majority of inner-city African-American's make the personal decision to embrace the God who loves them and finds their self-worth in Christ who died for them that any change will ever occur in that community. Screaming and rioting may rattle some cages, but how has the Watts district in L.A. ever changed in the 40 years since the riots of the 60's? Not one iota. In fact, the problems are worse.

No, until the African-American community turns toward the light of Christ authentically given to the world through Jesus' chosen apostles and their true successors, that is, the Pope and the bishops of the Catholic Church today, there
will continue to be tragedies like Sean Bell.

An Open Letter the Iranian Government

Dear Iranian President and Officials,

Thank you for sending the American People your letter. Here is our response: POUND SAND. You ought to be glad we don't nuke you to kingdom come. Our President may be restrained by the liberal idiots in our country from nuking you off the planet, but you ought to be grateful that citizens like me are not in charge, because we wouldn't care. Quite frankly, your way of government stinks. No, I take that back, it sucks. Don't you EVER try to pull the crap here in our community that you do in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq and the rest of world. We won't be restrained by our goverment. We won't care. That's a dangerous thing for you, my friends. So, sit in your little opium dens, rape your little boys, and have Ali Babi do a little dance around you while you plot your next attack, and be warned. Jerks. End of letter.

Sincerely,

The American People

Choices

This past baseball season had me wanting to purchase a jersey of my favorite team, the Yankees. Not knowing at the time anything of the baseball jersey market, I figured I'd be spending maybe $19.99 tops for a cotton pinstripe thing with the NY logo superimposed over the left breast and maybe I'd have a number "4" for Lou Gehrig put on the back. After all, its just a shirt worn today, stained by ketchup and tossed into Goodwill tomorrow. Silly me.

So, I turned where every would-be bargain hunter turns today to find what he or she is looking for, the internet. E-bay, being a pain in the rear to use, and a site that blasphemed my Catholic faith and my Lord, Jesus Christ when they allowed some Satan-driven nut job to sell a consecrated host, pretty much permanently turned me away from ever using them again. So, I began looking at all the other options: Shopzilla, Yahoo Shopping, BizRate, you name it. 69 to 79 bucks, for a piece of clothing, and they were the cheap ones. To my surprise, they even had Lou Gehrig Jerseys--for only $199! What a bargain! (Don't you love that. Like the shopper is some kind of idiot. OK, I take it back, many are.) Only (x exorbitant sum)! Sheesh.

Then I couldn't find anything in 100% cotton or even flannel which is what I wanted. Like Lou Gehrig wore a 100% polyester baseball jersey in 1926. "Authentic Throwback Jersey. 100% Polyester." No, you idiots at Majestic. "Throwback" means a 100% flannel jersey without a name on the back because there were no names on the back in 1929. Prior to that, there weren't even numbers! So, now I have to spend half my monthly paycheck on material I don't want. Only $299. For a shirt with a name and a number on the back. The real question is why can they charge this much? Because selfish idiots (and being largely liberal, New York and New Jersey are filled with them) are dumb enough to buy it. In good conscience, I couldn't buy one of these jerseys for more than $19.99. In reality, even that is too much. I think of people who cannot even afford tonight's dinner and something becomes very wrong with our spending habits.

George Bush is supposedly out of touch with America. The only reason he is out of touch is because to his credit, he is blissfully naive enough, as a President should be, to presume the best of the people of our nation, and the best means that we have some semblance left of Christian conscience which can discern moral right from moral wrong, something that at least 51% of Amerca can no longer do. Yes. President Bush, who comes from a Christian perpective is out of touch with America because America is very out of touch with what is truly real. Bush's real crime is that he is a Christian and is not ashamed to profess it. That is the real reason the liberal and corrupt media hates him. That is the real reason 51% of America hates him. We live in an electronic world of entertainment and video stimulation driven by greed and profit and everything that is opposed to Christ. American Idol is the motivation for our youth because to be a corrupt, aimless actor who goes around inbreeding Hollywood means fame and fortune. Like this is reality. Yeah, "Idol" is the right word.

In the 16th chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, Jesus tells a story of a poor beggar named Lazarus and a rich man which Roman tradition calls Dives (which is Latin for "Rich"). In the story, Lazarus spends his old age penniless begging at the gates of the house of Dives who eats and drinks his life away, entertaining his friends in his rich home. Lazarus longs for the scraps that Dives feeds to his dog. In the end both die. Lazarus winds up consoled and at rest in the bosom of Abraham. Dives goes to a place of torment, presumably Hell. Dives looks afar off and sees Lazarus at the bosom of Abraham and asks Father Abraham to send Lazarus to him for at least a drop of water to quench his burning thirst. Father Abraham explains he cannot because there is a great gap between the two places and no one can cross from one to the other. Dives then asks Father Abraham to at least warn his sinful brothers that they don't end up where he is. Father Abraham explains that they have the writings of Moses and the prophets to warn them, but Dives protests saying "No, Father Abraham, if only someone would go to them from the dead then they would listen," but Father Abraham tells them that if they refuse to listen to Moses and the prophets, even someone going back to them from the dead to warn them will do them no good.

The lesson of this story is that Dives doesn't wind up in Hell because he's a bad guy. After all, he wined and dined his friends and opened his house to them, right? The reason he is condemned, very gently and lovingly I might add (he's never yelled at or belittled by his Maker--that's what we sinful, if not frustrated, Christians wrongfully do in God's name all the time), is because he never thinks to lift a finger for Lazarus. He never goes outside of his own little world to think that maybe there are other people he can help. That maybe the gift that God created him with to be able to make money was not meant to be used for himself but to help those who don't have the same gifts and cannot fend well for themselves or their families. He is condemned because he stuck his head in the sand of his own little world and refused to look about him. Sounds like a lot of people I know today. Jesus said the path to condemnation is wide and many there are who travel it. He urges, not demands, but urges us, for our sake, to take the "road less traveled." We would be wise to follow it. We don't have time on this planet to be distracted by snakecharmers like Dan Brown. People like Brown won't escape the fate of Dives for leading astray thousands of souls from a faith they might have otherwise had unless they reconcile themselves to God for their terrible errors. Sadly, Brown has probably already lost the grace of repentance forever, but most of us can still acknowledge our sinful selves and turn to God because he isn't done with us yet.

God offers grace and we need to jump on it while the offer is hot. If we reject him, he allows us that choice. Choice is a terrible thing in a universe where God's most supreme law is that of Free Will. We can choose hell if we wish. He won't stop us if we insist. Most people hate Christianity because they think it is about condemnation. It's not. It is about salvation. Additionally, there have been many Christians in history, both Catholic and Protestant, who really have given bad witness to Christ. This is not God's fault and its not the Catholic Church's fault, at least not in her divine ideal. It is our fallen nature's fault. But fallen man is too dull to see that either. In the end, it is not God who condemns us. It is we who have made the free choice to turn completely from him. It is we who condemn ourselves. We tell God "no", by our choices and actions. What is God supposed to do, twist our arms and make us love him? No, the alternative is to be away from him. So, in his mercy, God created a place where his love does not exist. That place is a place of torment because without God, there is no love. There are only people like Dives who never think to think of anyone but themselves. There are angels like that, too. Unfortunately, they are a bad tempered lot with greater ability to hate and they rule us because in Hell, they are the stronger and the fitter.

God has given us a free will. We can use it however we wish. God is pro-choice, but not in the selfish abortion sense that slogan is bandied about today. We have free choice to buy exorbitantly priced goods, especially in the season of Christmas. We have the free choice to abort our babies because of the selfishness and lack of thougtfulness before we selfishly decided to use someone else and have sex (or in the very rare case that Roe v. Wade was wrongfully, if not originally intended for, we were too selfish to give our innocent baby conceived in a rape up for adoption). We have the free choice to allow ourselves to be sankecharmed by David Letterman, Jay Leno, and American Idol. We have the free choice to vote for those who turn all that is truly good and right upside down and have the gall to call it "good" and "morally right" when it is nothing but immoral filth. Be careful of free choices, lest Dives's fate becomes ours.

Selling Out the Troops

With the change in Congress, we can expect a 2008 Democrat victory in the White House and the consequential increase of moral disaster in America--like it is not already bad enough--and political disaster in Iraq to follow. It's looming large on the horizon already. Even Iran is afraid we are pulling out too soon. Well, maybe for the best, eh? Let 'em kill each other and let Allah sort 'em out, right 51% America? Hell, with all the sacrifice you put into watching the evening news, its about time we got out of there.

Of course, L.A.M.E. (the Liberal American Media Elite) and L.I.E. (the Liberal Intellectual Elite) will spin it into a great success for the democrats, pinning all blame on President Bush and the previous Congress. Many will look at Iraq now and claim it is already a disaster. Well, 51% America, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. Wait until we start pulling out. Think back to Vietnam. That country may seem peaceful, now, but underneath its communist facade those people have no freedom to even explore the possibility of the profound goodness in Jesus Christ, and those who do are tortured and persecuted. This is a dirty little secret both here and in China that L.A.M.E. will never report. Of course, this would be just fine for people like Dan Brown and all who were gullible enough to buy his tripe in The Da Vinci Code, (people believe what they want to believe) but my personal experience of faith tells a very different story. I know the reality of Christ. I've watched a thousand little miracles in my life that I can't otherwise explain. I don't even question it. When they happen, I just smile and say, "Thanks, Lord. You are so good to me, and I don't even deserve it." My prayers, are usually answered in the affirmative. Just keep in mind that with prayer, sometimes the answer is "no", and you can't kick and scream like a whiny brat when it is. Also, if you are not willing to take "no" as an answer from the Almighty, he won't answer your next prayer either. He knows what's best for us. He created us, but this is matter for another post.

Vietnam became a killing ground. Remember the "boat people"? Remember Pol Pot in Cambodia? What do you think that was about? Our pullout. Our caving to L.A.M.E. and 51% America. Remember the Kurds after we pulled out of Iraq in 1991 instead of taking out Hussein then? So stand by for the same in Iraq. In the immortal words of Ross Perot, a troop pullout will create a giant sucking sound which will be the power vaccuum. Every penny ante wannabe control freak powermonger will try to fill the void and the innocent will be the victims. Half the tribal leadership will try to seize power. The rest will be male radical fundamentalist Muslims blowing up everyone on every street corner in protest of whatever it is they protest.

The problem with our beleagured President is that he and the G.O.P. Congress allowed the L.I.E. to dictate the rules of engagement in Iraq. In his Nov 13th broadcast, Rush Limbaugh pointed out that Janet "El" Reno didn't give a crap about answering the mail when she gave authority to burn out David Koresh and kill 23 innocent children. Did she resign? Hell, no. Or how about sending in the FBI to kidnap a little 8 year old (cf. Elian Gonzalez) in order to deport him back to Cuba? Wow, now there was a threat to be reckoned with, eh? If that wasn't an embarrassing waste of tax dollars, I don't know what was. Why did she get away with this? The same reason FDR got away with firebombing Germany and Japan, because he was a democrat and the press does not hold democrats responsible for ANYTHING, and never did. Name me one example in history where a democrat was grilled by the press for something he or she did wrong. I defy you. Can you imagine what would happen if the Monica Lewinsky disgrace happened to a Republican President? Hell, it would STILL be on the front page of USA Today. What the GOP should have done was take charge and stop pussy footing around with the press. The hell with embeds. Bush should have ordered strict censorship and media blackout like George H. did in the Gulf War, and prosectued any reporter or closed any newspaper that printed unauthorized stories fed them by terrorists---with armed force if necessary.

OK, now you've got me started. What this country really needs is an enema starting with the press and the media. In the 1960's, Hollywood lost control of itself. It threw out the decency laws and they began spewing filth on national television and in the theaters. What conservatives need to do at this point is leave NYC, Chicago, Massoftuschitts, LA, Denver, and Hollywonk and move to the open plains. Then drop nukes on the remaining trash who refuse to see truth and start from scratch. Really. Nothing would be the worse for the wear. The places are a mess anyway. Oh, liberal hypocrite like Rosie O'Donnell, don't get all up on your high horse about labeling me a "dangerous Christian conservative extremist". You spew more hate speech and foment in two sentences talking about people like me than Rush has in 20 years of the EIB Network. You know damn well that the only people in America who do not enjoy protection from hate speech are Christian conservatives.

Here's what is really amazing: the people who live in these high tax states like Massoftuschitts, New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin have no clue that anything is wrong there. They go about giving half their income or more to the state and federal government thinking, "doesn't everybody?" This is because they are so myopic and clannish they never travel outside the mile radius of their neighborhood. So, the average Joe Liberal is completely clueless that states like Missouri and Ohio are not paying $3.00 a gallon for gasoline right now. Here's the kicker. They live in the misery of cities occupied by liberal democrat politicians that they have been electing for twenty or thirty years or more, yet, they don't see that the liberal democrats are the reason for the corruption in their cities. WELL IT AIN'T THE CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS, you idiots! You haven't elected one in your miserable excuse for a city in 50 years. But, of course, it's all George Bush's fault. The Libs have told us so. Now, its time for a change. Like every election. Now, it'll be different. Yep.

Well, I just want to thank 51% of America for sellling out the troops, myself included. Thanks for wasting our sacrifice, just like you did in Vietnam. Thanks for not having the guts and spine to stick it out until it was finished. Thanks for selling out the friends we made in Iraq. What did you lose 51% America? Your son wasn't there. You didn't make any sacrifices. It was us, but because you couldn't take watching the sacrifices we were making for you, you sold us out. Feeling guilty? Thanks. Thanks for nothing. I hope you can sleep well now. Thank God for God. At least someone someday will show you your sins, and you won't be able to stick your head in the sand and pretend he doesn't exist. May God forgive me for my poor attitude. "Place not your trust in princes or in men..."

A Post Election Rant (If you voted Democrat, this Blog's For You!)

Hey America! Wake up your sleepy heads, rub your eyes! Get out of bed! George Bush, the Wicked Witch, is Dead! Or not, but good enough for government work, eh? A little impeachment here, a little indictment there. Nancy, Barb, Hillary, and Clare will be sure to trump up those charges in the next six months or so "in the spirit of bi-partisanship," because Clare McCaskill, for one, is "on OUR side". I guess that would be 51% of America's side.

OK, enough sarcasm for now, plenty of space for that later. Let's move on. Time for your history lesson, America! Up and at 'em! Eat your Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, grab your comic books, and come to school. There's LOTS of learning to do today and being the eager open-minded liberals that you are I know you are just dying to learn some wonderful things in cyberspace today!

Your Lesson for the Day: Vietnam, Iraq, and the Liberal Media

Now that fickle and media-mislead America (that would be a blistering 51% of you--this year) have given their precious Democrats the power that they have professed as their birthright in America's political machine, we can watch to see just how marvelous they will handle the nation and its involvement in Iraq. Of course, any bumbling will be blamed on our embattled and beleagured President, aided, of course, by the omni-present, Almighty Liberal Media --The god of the American People.

(Oh, by the way, amazing how strangely silent it is after this election. No whining and crying about stealing elections or disenfranchised, unregistered voters, or counts and recounts, despite scores of races and issues that were decided by less than 1% margin and despite major problems with voters being turned away in Missouri for lack of ballots in Republican counties. Just wanted to point that out.)

As a two tour veteran of Iraq, I feel I have earned my right to tell the American Media and anyone who fell prey to their negative image-making of President Bush and so took it out on us troops by electing irresponsible, self-serving, liberal snots to the nation's highest offices to go to hell. And post haste, too (James Webb in VA excluded. Being a good man, he'll eventually see the light.) Not that eternity in Hell would make their lives any less confused, corrupt, and immoral than they already are... or is Hell simply a continuation of the poor choices we've made and our turning away from the offer of God's love for us resulting in our misery on earth? Hmmmm....

Liberal Hypocrisy 101.
There is so much to say about this one I will save it for another time. Or not, but at least allow me to lay out a short illustration or two. Someone please tell me how does the sneaking of a few democrat political documents out of a hotel room (i.e., Nixon and Watergate) compare to ex-NSA chief Sandy Berger's (Sandy Burgler's?) sneaking of TOP SECRET documents out of the national archives and shoving them down his pants so no one notices? Oh, it's OK, it's Sandy. Bill "I never had sex with that woman" (under my Oval office desk while ducking phone calls about Bin Laden) Clinton was your boss and you are his protected minion. No, in our profound Mercy, we, the Media God forgive you. But, YOU, Mr. Nixon, you had evil people steal REALLY important Democrat political strategy papers from a trash can in a HOTEL room! YOU are an evil, EVIL crook deserving impeachment, hellfire and damnation for all political eternity! And YOU Mr. Foley, you had a consenting young gay man write you back on your government e-mail. For SHAME! I'm afraid YOU must die a fiery death in political historical hell, too. BUT, dear, kindly, President Mr. Bill Clinton.... awww, well, gee, nobody cares if YOU showed young, luvstruck Monica Lewinsky a little southern hospitality under your oval office desk and completely disgraced your office. Why, heck, it's nothing any good 'ol boy from Arkansas wouldn't do behind the tobacco barn on a warm spring day. Why, how do you think little Democrats are bred? We'll just let that little slip up go unnoticed, after all, we have that little spouse of yours to elect as FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT in 2008. And speaking of you, dearest Hillary... Oh, you naughty little girl, taking that 8 million in proceeds for your book in some illegal fashion or other. Hey, you shouldn't do that. You might spoil your chances for the glory we wish to bestow upon your beloved and honorable name. But, YOU, Mr. Newt Gingrich, you, TOO, took proceed monies from a book while YOU were in office as Mr. Speaker, and YOU will spend the REST of YOUR LIFE in political historical hell, where you will rot forever and ever! Oh, soooo sorry.

So, class, what have we learned today thus far? If you are a Democrat, the Liberal Media will protect you no matter HOW morally corrupt you are, but if you are a Republican, you will be dragged through the mud and occupy our headlines until all the real news that exposes liberalism for the moral disaster that it is passes into oblivion. (Like the U.N. passing out condoms instead of real medicine and food to starving Somalians during Clinton's presidency. Or the bombing of innocent civilians by U.N. forces--Clinton Presidency. Giving away Nuclear secrets to China and North Korea--Bill Clinton, again, and the brilliant, if not incredibly stupid policies of Madeleine Notbright--but of course, it is Bush's fault North Korea miraculously developed Nuclear technology this year all by themselves.) Class dismissed. Next period....

2nd Period. History 101.
Flashback, Vietnam. 1968. Hey, America, if you don't study and apply yourselves, you might end up in Iraq.... duhhh... or was that Vietnam? Hey, class, did it ever dawn on you that it wasn't President Nixon who got us into Vietnam? Let's think back to the BEGINNING of our involvement there. Who was in office? No, it wasn't Richard Nixon. He lost that election to your darling, John F. Kennedy. Yes, the American Camelot Prince himself. A democrat. Perhaps he was not so nearly insanely liberal as Nancy "My-Noble-Agenda-While-I-am-Speaker-is-to-Impeach-Bush" Pelosi or Barbara Boxer Shorts, or Hillary I've-Just-Gotta-Be-the-First-Female-President-or- I'll-Die Clinton, but liberal enough for his time. Then, Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, yes, that's President Lyndon Johnson, (did I mention he was a Democrat? Yes. He was a DEMOCRAT) got us in deeper, dictating policy from his desk far away on a communist enemy who played him like piano. Then, BECAUSE a Republican robbed the left of its political birthright (enter Richard Nixon, 1968, whose only real crime was the stupidity of getting himself elected in late 1960's America) well, that just couldn't stand. So, for the next six years the Liberal Intellectual Elite (L.I.E.) did everything in their power to lose the war for America, aided once again by the sheeple of America's god, their Almighty Advocate and powerbrokers, the Liberal American Media Elite (L.A.M.E.), which exploited every moral, tactical, or strategic blunder (committed, oh, by the way, in all wars by both sides) all over American television sets and liberal newspapers in the nation, all to cast aspersions upon the Republican in the Oval Office. In the meanwhile, L.I.E., i.e., the New England, New York, and California Snot that pulls the strings of the Liberal Media, and that era's version of the George Soros' and Michael Moore's of the world, the same oh-so munificent souls who sprinkle their excess pennies upon the less fortunate and, who having led these poor, wretched souls to the slaughter pens of the moral filth they peddle, never give a sheet of soiled toilet paper for the soldier on the ground who was devastingly demoralized by their country's lack of support, and who gleefully played "innocently" into the hands of Mr. Giap's strategy.

(Think I'm full of it? Click here:


Ho Chi Minh and, later, General Vo Nguyen Giap, were no idiots. They knew the key to their success was the American media's persuasion of our nation against the war. All the Vietnamese had to do to win was live in their country and thwart America's willpower at home. They knew it wasn't General Westmoreland's operational plan, but America's weak will that only need be exploited. With traitors like John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and the American Media on their side, it was a simple game of agitate and wait back in the Nam. Thanks to the lack of willpower by cowardly U.S. college studentry who stood no chance of getting drafted anyway for their student deferments, forced us to abandon the rest of the people of South Vietnam and left us the killing fields, so that some L.A.M.E. producer could pretend to wring his hands in agony over his guilt while making a few million dollars on a movie about it to boot.

Any student of military strategy knows that to win in assymetric war, control and exploitation of the media must occur. Being communist, it wasn't hard for the poor, persecuted, and still smarting communist media types still smarting from Joe McCarthy who gave them a tiny smattering of what they had been doling out throughout the entire history of their miserable collective existence to aid and abet old Uncle Ho. Sun Tzu, whose playbook Ho Chi Minh followed, writes in his famous treatise, The Art of War, and I loosely paraphrase, that the mark of a true warrior is to be able to win a war without ever bearing an arm. The smartest way to win a war is to outmaneuver your opponent without having to fire a shot. It's cheap. Nothing is lost, and you've gained everything. It is not brawn that wins. It is brains. Assymetric warfare is fought by using ALL elements necessary to weaken the will of your opponent. Media is one of the biggest tools of exploitation in Assymetric warfare, but our own American Media won't let us use it to win in Iraq. Yes, L.A.M.E. will let terrorist thugs use it even to the point of lulling vapid airheads like Cindy Sheehan into believing they are the "good" guys. He who controls the media, can shape the masses by sheer impression and perception. It can probably be argued that the reason we won World War II was because a Democrat was in power. L.I.E. and L.A.M.E. saw to it that they cooperated with FDR's unprecedented censorship of the press to protect American lives ( if not shape post-war Europe into a communist Disneyland). Nor did L.A.M.E. ever fire a single rhetorical volley when FDR decided to run for two extra terms in office, "because we need to keep the nation unified under one commander-in-chief." After all, we ALL wanted to elect him. (That wasn't the story my WWII veteran father told me). Could you imagine, if George Bush were to just up and run for a third term under the same argument? The Sinful Hypocrites of the American Media Elite (SHAME) would scream bloody murder DEMANDING he be tossed from office, and it would take Barbara Boxer Shorts, Nancy "Impeach Bush" Pelosi and Clare, The-Only-Reason-I'm-In-Office-is-to-Hold-George-Bush-Accountable, McAsskill an Angry Hillary minute to do so.

So, here's the final ironic tragedy of Vietnam, class. Two noted OSS officers, one by the name of Maj Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan and Major Archimedes L. A. Patti, advising in Indochina (that's post-WWII Vietnam for the geographically challenged) at the end of WWII advised Harry S. Truman, another DEMOCRAT, that "if we (the U.S.) did not help Ho Chi Minh now, we will have to fight him later." We didn't and so we did. "Uncle Ho" ran to Communist Russia for help. (He didn't want help from Communist China at that time, although later they reconciled their traditional political differences). All Ho wanted was a war torn colonized people to be united as a sovereign nation. He didn't care WHO helped him. He didn't care what form of government it took. He just wanted a united people to be a nation. So, DEMOCRAT Truman, blows it for America and Democracy by marginalizing the funny little Asian from who knows where and his nobody-cares-about-it problems. In 20 years we were there, fighting Uncle Ho and his minions. In eleven years, 58,000 Americans and only God knows how many Vietnamese would die for a result that could have been resolved by a little politcal savvy paid to Uncle Ho by President Truman. Now Communist Vietnam continues to persecute those who desire to seek religious freedom, especially in the Catholic Church which exists underground therein.

Flash Forward. Iraq, 2006.
Hey America, you either still haven't figured it out or you are too fat, dumb, and happy to care, but listen up, ARMS DON'T WIN WARS, WILLPOWER DOES. IT'S THE WILLPOWER OF A NATION THAT WINS OR LOSES ITS COUNTRY'S WARS. National will brings about funding and support. If we lose in Iraq, it is YOU who lost it. YOU who will have wasted our lives, NOT President Bush. YOU who should be ashamed of your treachery to your own nation. President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld set a course in Iraq. Is it perfect? No, but I am sure the media's ability to monday-morning quaterback will find the sure solution, won't it? You want us to pull out? Stupidity and folly. Strike that. Extraordinary idiocy---or extraordinary selfishness that goes beyond evil.

Flashback, Northern Iraq, December 1991. The setting, post Gulf War Iraq.
George H. Bush listens to Colin Powell and pulls out of Iraq without toppling Hussein's corrupt government. Who's left holding the bag? The Kurds. Hussein gasses them, sprays them, and begins a campaign of genocide against them while they huddle homeless and shelterless in the bitter cold of a northern Iraq winter. Today, a young Marine whom I had the honor to meet, a comrade in arms, one of the Kurdish child suvivors in that nightmare still scarred by chemical muntions he barely survived, teaches U.S. Marines Iraqi culture and language classes.

Just what do you think will happen when we pull out of Iraq dear liberal sheeple of 51% America? Or don't you really give a rat's behind because you are too selfish to care about anything but your nails or your toxic drug prescriptions? When you've actually been there and made friends with these people, you don't hang them out to dry. Well, maybe YOU do. Maybe George Soros does. Maybe Nancy Pelosi does. Maybe Clare McCaskill does. Maybe John Kerry does, just like he undermined America's effort in Vietnam and left us to abandon the peaceful Montagnaard's who only wanted to be left alone, but who were forced into the war and who in the end, were genocidally slaughtered by the communist pigs in Vietnam once the Democrat Congress cut funding to the effort caving to the American media and forced us out of there before the job was done. O.K., I'll tell you what will happen. I'll make this easy for you: Iraq will fall into chaos for about ten years. Then, either Iran will take them over or another strongman dictator, like Saddam Hussein reincarnated, will take power and nothing will have been gained or changed from pre-9-11 Iraq. Innocent people there will be the victims of the ensuing slaughter while you rest comfortably in your selfish life. THAT's what will happen. You will blame it on Bush's War, but in the end, it'll be YOUR fault because you were too stupid to think about anyone but yourself or to strive for moral goodness in your life.

Well, school's out for today, America. Go home and feel good about yourselves. Forget everything you learned today for tomorrow's another day! And don't forget, nothing that happens today will be remembered tomorrow. Unless of course, it is a Republican who makes the boo-boo.