Does Bush Have a Direct Line to God? (or just Scalia?)

[Demeter]

http://scoop.epluribusmedia.org/story/2007/7/11/95034/5562


Does Bush Have a Direct Line to God?
by carol white
Wed Jul 11, 2007 at 09:03:44 PM EST

originally posted Wed Jul 11, 2007 at 09:50:34 AM EST and bumped -- Carol White contacted Nick Benton, editor of the print Falls Church News and got his permission to post his editorial in full online. -- cho


Nick Benton ties Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence to his religious fundamentalism and the claim that he can trump the U.S. Constitution in God's name whenever it suits his purpose.

This post is courtesy of Nick Benton, owner editor of the Fall's Church News




Nicholas F. Benton: The Libby Commutation

Written by Nicholas F. Benton
Wednesday, 04 July 2007


Maybe Bush's outrageous commutation of Scooter Libby's will help some folks recognize that this president and his cronies have more than normal self-interest or operative pragmatic scheming in mind.

The Libby case, as with so many others, is not about Libby or any particular incident. It's not about respect for the "rule of law," either. If you say it's more about "who gets to make the law," you'd be closer to the truth.

The oft-used term "neo-conservatives," or "neo-cons," is thrown around the identify the circles that helped lift this current administration to power, but the true spirit or meaning of the general term is not easily grasped. No, these are not just new conservatives, not just another Ronald Reagan or your daddy's Moose lodge.

At the top, these people have a total overhaul of U.S. Constitutional government in mind. Bush and friends are the first administration that has achieved a level of power high enough to exhibit this. Their goal is the end of democracy as defined by the U.S. Constitution.

They came into office on the shoulders of the same forces, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and those under his sway on that bench who installed Bush as the president in December 2000.

Appropriately, it is a movement steeped in religious convictions, as religion is a domain that needs no respect for the secular U.S. Constitution.

In Scalia's case, many, including myself, attending a dinner honoring a retiring George Mason University law professor in Arlington in January 2003, were shocked to hear him couch in Jesuit-steeped legaleze the core substance of his notion of law.

In so many words, he said the law is defined by who wins. If you win, you get to decide what is legal and what isn't.

It's a variant on "might makes right" and other tenants of "social Darwinism," the ideology which, when unbridled in political practice, leads to all varieties of tyranny.

Since that night, I've been dismayed by the notion that such an ideology would be operative on the U.S. Supreme Court. That court is assigned with preserving the notion that U.S. law, and its defense of equal justice and democratic institutions, is rooted in the U.S. Constitution, not the most recent thug elected to a high place.

It has not been until Bush's two most recent appointments to the Supreme Court that Scalia's viewpoint has appeared to obtain the majority there.

In President Bush's case, he comes from of a particularly unsavory ultra right-wing Protestant religious influence that combines its influence on controlling his self-destructive personal habits with its claims that God's law supercedes man's laws and that the true believer must be obedient to the former.

The likes of Dick Cheney and others, of course, don't require the religious trappings on this notion. For them, Scalia is sufficient: You win, you rule.

But humans, being how they are, prefer promises of eternal bliss and threats of the opposite for misbehaving, to motivate their actions.

Bush adopted his brand of the "real thing," religiously, in Texas. It was channeled through the funding arms of right-wing, California billionaire Howard Ahmanson, Jr., bringing the so-called Christian Reconstructionist movement of theologian R. J. Rushdoony directly to Gov. Bush's door.

Ahmanson is an Orange County arch-conservative who not only drew the late Rushdoony to his breast, but has funded countless efforts at transforming mainstream Protestant Christian institutions into something in his image. This has included the effort to induce a schism in the Episcopal Church U.S.A.

Rushdoony's core belief is that God is calling America to replace Constitutional law with Biblical law. That is, all the tenants in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and the others, including the literal stoning of gays and whores, are to become the law of the land.

Bush is constantly told that God is working through him. On the road to full Biblical rule, he must act without respect for the Constitution. He must wiretap, he must allow Guantanamo, he must permit Abu Ghraib, he must defend Cheney's refusal to disclose, he must sanction leaks exposing covert CIA operations, he must stack the court system, all this and more with disdain and disregard for the Constitution.

For him, it's not only because he can, but because God is telling him to.

Spread the Word:

[meegbear]

1. This issue has already been resolved ...

Voice Of God Revealed To Be Cheney On Intercom



Telephone logs recorded by the National Security Agency and obtained by Congress as part of an ongoing investigation suggest that the vice president may have used the Oval Office intercom system to address President Bush at crucial moments, giving categorical directives in a voice the president believed to be that of God.

While journalists and presidential historians had long noted Bush's deep faith and Cheney's powerful influence in the White House, few had drawn a direct correlation between the two until Tuesday, when transcripts of meetings that took place in March and April of 2002 became available.

In a transcript of an intercom exchange recorded in March 2002, a voice positively identified as the vice president's identifies himself as "the Lord thy God" and promotes the invasion of Iraq, as well as the use of torture in prisoner interrogations.

A close examination of Bush's public statements and Secret Service time logs tracking the vice president reveals a consistent pattern, one which links Bush's belief that he had received word from God with Cheney's use of the White House's telephone-based intercom system.

<snip>

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43189

[Demeter]

2. I Saw That! That Was When The Onion Was Still Funny

and hadn't turned into the precognitive oracle it is today. Now they are the most truthful name in the MSM, and all by accident (I think)