[Dialogue] re: Harry Wainwright and George Holcombe

[Lucille Chagnon]

Lucille Chagnon here.

The article from The Nation that Harry Wainwright forwarded, 
    The Optimism of Uncertainty by Howard Zinn 
is the most helpful article I have read over these painful months.  Thank you, Harry. I'm sure I'm not the only one struggling daily--and hourly sometimes--with The Word relative to the state of our government.  If you missed Zinn's article, the URL is: 
       http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040920&s=zinn

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After writing what precedes and what follows this brief paragraph, I realized that I'm referring you below to the same article that George Holcombe mentioned in a recent e-mail.  Thanks, George, and allow me to second your motion: 

The (combined) postings for Oct. 21 and 22 from the Information Clearing House 
        (To subscribe:  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/subscribe.htm  )
contained a very long article by Ayelish McGarvey that may interest some of you.
      http://207.44.245.159/article7106.htm
I've excerpted a bit of it:

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As God Is His Witness
    Bush is no devout evangelical. In fact, he may not be a Christian at all. 
By Ayelish McGarvey, 10/19/04 "American Prospect" 

...Bush’s attraction to Jesus jargon is no accident. As an aspiring pol, he learned early on that religious language could give him the cowboy cred he needed to woo voters in Texas. Doug Wead is a close friend of the Bush family and a prominent evangelical motivational speaker. Wead worked closely with the president when he advised George Bush Senior during the 1988 presidential campaign. “There’s no question that [George W. Bush’s] faith is real, that it’s authentic … and there is no question that it’s calculated,” Wead told Frontline. “I know that sounds like a contradiction.” 

Wead taught Bush Junior to “signal early and signal often” when he spoke to conservative Christians on behalf of Bush Senior. “George would read my memos, and he would be licking his lips saying, ‘I can use this to win in Texas,’” Wead told Guy Lawson in an article that appeared last year in GQ. 

But in the Bible, Jesus Christ disdained insincere religious posturing. In the famed parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee, the penitent taxman prayed in a far corner of the temple and wept, hiding his face from God in shame. 
...

For Bible-believing Christians, nothing in the entire world is more important than “walking” with Jesus; that is, engaging in a personal relationship with their savior and living according to his word. With this in mind, I recently asked Haggard, himself the pastor of a large church in Colorado, why the president, as a man of supposedly strong faith, did not publicly apologize for continually misleading Americans in the run-up to the Iraq War. Instead, Bush clung zealously to misinformation and half-truths. I asked Haggard why, as a man of Christian principle, Bush did not fully disavow Karl Rove’s despicable smear tactics and apologize for the ugly lies the Bush campaign spread over the years about Ann Richards, John McCain, and John Kerry, among others. After all, isn’t getting right with God -- whatever the political price --the most important thing for the sort of Christian Bush has proclaimed himself to be? 

Haggard laughed as though my questions were the most naive he’d ever heard. “I think if you asked the president these questions once he’s out of office,” Haggard said, “he’d say, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t have done it.’ But right now if he said something like that, well, the world would spin out of control! 

“That’s why when Jimmy Carter ran, he [turned out to be] such a terrible president. Because when he [governed], he really tried to maintain [his integrity] and those types of values -- and that is virtually impossible.” 

The pastor returned to my charges of Bush’s deceitfulness. “Listen,” he said testily, “I think [we Christian believers] are responsible not to lie [sic], but I don’t think we’re responsible to say everything we know.” ...
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Grace and Peace to all,
Lucille Chagnon
Wilmington, DE