PUTNEY — This country has been governed by idiots for the past seven-plus years. If they are the best of our country's citizenry I can almost agree with Kansas that evolution is a myth. When Bush stands in front of a press conference, arms slightly forward with jutting jaw and brow, doesn't he look like he's about to drop to his knuckles and charge the press like a silverback gorilla?
Any leaders that have evolved past homo habilis would have known that getting us involved in Afghanistan was a loser's game. They were likely sitting around the ranch sucking on bourbon and branch water when Afghan fighters eviscerated the Soviet Union. They just don't give up.
These same chicken hawks skulked around successfully avoiding military service during the Vietnam war wherein our government tried to prop up another regime that was doomed to failure. Have Bush and Cheney, together with their battalion of bloodthirsty noncombatant yes-men, really not evolved? Or don't they ever read history?
If they just pulled their heads out of their collective colons they would see that countries with the will to have a democracy would do it on their own. Some are just not ready.
Burma has shown that their military dictatorship is in trouble. Iran threw off the chains forged by this country and implemented by our lackey the Shah. The Iranian people defeated that government despite us. They certainly didn't get the government we would have liked or a Western style democracy, but they got what they wanted.
The Palestinian people elected Hamas over our choice when they held elections. Now George “Democracy” Bush won't deal with them. There ought to be a stronger word than “hypocrite” to describe him. How about “hypocretin”?
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Back to Afghanistan, and its population of pious sheep. The multitudes have once again risen up and are murdering each other in the streets over some Dutch newspaper that is running cartoons of Muhammad again.
Just as George Bush has perverted our democracy and spat on our constitution, so Islamic fanatics have (purposely?) misconstrued the Koran and made violence a tenet of their faith. Recently a British expatriate teacher made headlines around the world when her elementary school class named a teddy bear “Muhammad.” Sudanese fanatics wanted her executed.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and she was charged with crimes that could only result in three years in jail and 120 lashes. Dodged a bullet there, didn't she.
In case you think that only flea-bitten Sudanese lunatics support this kind of idiocy, you would be wrong. A statement circulated by the Muslim Brotherhood similarly condemned her actions. The Muslim Brotherhood is a multinational Sunni Islamist movement and the world's most influential political Islamic organization. A global hissy-fit over a teddy bear. Allah Akbar.
All you Christians out there can stop rolling your eyes.
Have you ever heard of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints? This Mormon offshoot is 10,000 strong and resides along the border of Utah and Arizona. The bestseller Escape, by Carolyn Jessop, details the beliefs of this cadre of zealotic boneheads.
Men marry up to 20 or 30 women, some as young as 14. The leader “assigns” women to marry selected men. Should a man offend the leader he is jerked from his family and sent “afar” for years. He still has to send money back to the clan, and his wives and children are “reassigned.”
The real curse, as usual, is on the women. They are slaves to their husbands and must obey every whim or, when they die, they will not be accepted into heaven and will go directly to hell. Neither outside influences nor TV or radio are allowed. Other faiths and other people are the spawn of the devil … yadda yadda.
A sinner can pretty much get away with any atrocity as long as they crawl up to a holy man and beg “forgiveness.” A certain Pastor Roy Ratcliffe of the Church of Christ (you can look it up) decided to baptize Jeffrey Dahmer in a prison physical therapy tub. He then forgave all of Dahmer's sins and said “Jeff was in heaven with god now.” This is outrageous on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin.
Do you want mainstream madness? The forgiveness delusion doesn't compare to the power that the Catholic religion wields over its adherents.
When a nationwide scandal erupted over priests sodomizing boys, girls, and anything else with a heartbeat it should have spelled the end for the denomination. It didn't, and on top of that, Cardinal Bernard Law, a greasy sanctimonious pimp who reassigned countless pedophiles to new parishes where they could ruin more children's lives, resigned in scandal as the archbishop of Boston, yet now sits in the front row during Vatican ceremonies.
Do yourself a huge favor and read The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, a science professor at Oxford University. He demonstrates the impossibility of a supreme being with incisive logic. Even agnostics will learn that their position is an “untenable waffle.”
You may argue that you are happier to have the comfort of belief than to walk around with no faith at all. I suppose we would all be happier with a nose full of cocaine than not, but you have to sober up sometime.