THE TRUTH IS NOT IN HIM

Jerry Harkins

We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.                                                                                          —1 JOHN 2:3-6

Dear Christian Fundamentalist,

Well, you did it. You elected George W. Bush and, I am sure you will agree, you are responsible for him. You had your reasons: he appeared to be one of your own, he talked a pretty good game about the sanctity of life and family values, his policies and promises were resonant with your misgivings about the welfare state including social security, Medicaid, and Affirmative Action, and he had a deep distrust of science which you and he associate with materialism and even atheism. So you bought him, he’s yours, and now I think you must have a little case of buyer’s remorse. Things weren’t going well under Clinton and now you’re not much better off after five years of your own man. There’s a lot to worry about.

It’s okay if you’re not ready to admit all this out loud. Just today, I heard the father of a soldier in Iraq tell Mr. Bush, “I thank God you’re the President.” I think he was being sincere and what’s more I think his son probably agrees with him. But you saw what happened when he nominated Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. Many of you and most of your leaders abandoned him. You see what’s happening in Congress as his fellow conservative Republicans try to evade the toxic waste dump the White House has become. They’re like rats deserting a leaking ship which is precisely what I would do in the same circumstances. Did you notice they nearly blew the Alito nomination? I can’t think of a single Supreme Court confirmation vote that was closer (not counting those the nominee lost). The professional Republicans are not happy campers at the moment and I can’t think you are either. I don’t know which question is scarier. Could we have been wrong about him? Or, exactly where did we go wrong? But really if you’re not at least worried about it you might want to check for a pulse. The government is going to hell and it’s very largely your fault.

It was an easy mistake to make. Religion has always given you hope and a measure of assurance. You look to the third chapter of John about the importance of faith and the necessity of being “born again” and you note the President of the United States says he too is born again. You expect him to give God a central role in our nation’s affairs. Nations need God’s protection as much as you do, so you want our country to be like you imagine it used to be, back when there was less fear, less uncertainty and less confusion. That, in a nutshell, is why you voted for George W. Bush and, for better or worse, history will hold him to your account. Given the embarrassing failures of the second term, I’d like to offer this consideration of your relationship with the President.

I know it is not a matter of blind hero worship on your part. You are aware, in varying degrees, of Mr. Bush’s shortcomings. You can’t help but notice the shifty eyes, the sneer and the strut. You must shiver at the memory of the schoolyard bully. You know, I hope, he lies a lot. About things like weapons of mass destruction and global warming and social security. In your heart, you know he was a draft dodger and you were queasy about his slandering the military service of John Kerry. But you don’t care too much about such things because you agree with what he says are his objectives even if his tactics are less than ideal. Ever since Barry Goldwater told you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, you have had to soften your views about the end and the means. So you find yourself defending him not because you are enthusiastic about him personally but because any attack on him seems to be an attack on you and your values.

What would Jesus do? How, you must wonder, does Mr. Bush stand with the Lord? You can’t know, of course, but you can wonder.

You can see the Iraqis are having a hard time trying to learn how to live with each other. The draft constitution that the President promotes unashamedly enshrines Sharia as an “important” source of law and relegates women to something it calls its “transitional” section. You know in your hearts this is not the democracy for which we have spent so much blood and money. Yeah, I know women’s rights are not a high priority item with you. Wives be subject to your husbands. Barefoot and pregnant, that’s the ticket. If I told you what I think of St. Paul, you’d be scandalized, so I’ll spare you. But, please, whatever you think, Sharia is not democracy. Shedding blood for it is something you and I would leave to the Muslims. Mr. Bush says all that young American blood is being invested in freedom. But you’ve known all along you can’t force freedom on a people at the end of a gun. You tried to ignore it. You gathered around the flag and thought, “My country, right or wrong.” But what did you think when he came out of his hiding place in Crawford long enough to call the draft constitution an “amazing event” that protects women and religious freedom, and dismisses its obvious shortcomings with the throwaway line, “We had a little trouble with our own conventions writing a constitution?” Do you think he simply doesn’t understand the history or is this just another of his cheap throw-away lies?

Or take the matter of torture. Mr. Bush and his cronies want to torture suspected members of Al Qaeda. Senator McCain, a man who knows something about torture, says this is immoral, un-American and ineffective. But Mr. Bush wants an exception to the McCain anti-torture amendment so the CIA can torture suspects as long as the torture is, “…consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States and treaties to which the United States is a party.” How can torture be consistent with the Eighth Amendment? Here it is in its entirety: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” How can an administration that preaches strict constitutional interpretation out of one side of its mouth, advocate torture out of the other side? By lying, my friends. By lying. By saying often enough and loud enough that torture is perfectly consistent with the words, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” Like you, I have no brief for Osama and would be happy to strangle him. But I’d be damned before I’d say doing so is consistent with the Constitution. If nothing else, it’s a matter of self-respect.

He says he’s sending John Bolton to reform the UN which, I agree, needs some serious reforming. But when Mr. Bush says “reform” he’s lying. Again. His goal is not to reform the UN but to destroy it or, lacking complete destruction, at least to get the US out of it. Maybe he’s right. In recent decades, the UN has been good only for solving small problems that are not controversial. But I hate it that Mr. Bush says “reform” when he means “destroy.” I hate it that he says “privatize” social security when he means kill it. Conservatives have always found it difficult to kill entitlement programs. So decades ago you decided the best strategy would be to campaign against “big government” and attack not the programs but their funding. It’s called “starving the beast.” That has become the fundamental strategy of the Bush administration. But do you like it that the Big Lie has become the fundamental tactic? I hate it when the government’s reason for promoting No Child Left Behind is to sugar coat a $15 billion cut in education funding. I hate it when he calls his proposal to open up more land to the timber industry the Healthy Forests Initiative. Or when he allows the power industry to add 80 million tons of mercury to the air every year and calls it Clean Skies. Or when he says, “You’re doing a great job, Brownie.” The biggest lie of all and, by far, the most serious is the idea that the Iraq fiasco is part of the war on terrorism. In the beginning, it was a simple lie. There was no connection between the Islamic terrorists and the secular government of Iraq. The idea that Saddam was supporting Al Qaeda was merely a fabrication meant to shore up the weak case for waging preemptive war. But as things went from bad to worse, it turned into the Orwellian Lie. The administration has turned Iraq into the best thing that ever happened to the terrorists—a breeding ground, a training camp, and a recruitment incentive all over the Muslim world.

Did you remember George Orwell’s 1984 which set out to show that “…political chaos is connected with the decay of the language?” Big Brother was given to saying things like “War is peace” and “Love is hate.” The government was divided into four ministries: The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with the art of the big lie, the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war, the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order, and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. It’s one of the few books George Bush ever took to heart. Or maybe Karl Rove read the Cliff Notes.

Admit it: you fear that you can’t trust him to do even what he says he will do for you. You hope he’ll keep his promise about faith based initiatives. What you’ve gotten after four and a half years is a small White House bureaucracy and a fancy brochure. You’ve been trying to get him to pay more attention to North Korea where Christianity is considered treason. So far, he’s been more attentive to the sensibilities of the Dear Loony Tune in Pyongyang than to the plight of your (and his) co-religionists. When the Afghanis (his Afghanis) threatened to behead a Muslim who converted to Christianity, his response was, “Tsk, tsk. That’s not nice.” You liked his ban on stem cell research even if it was a Pyrrhic victory. Are you secretly rooting for the atheist scientists to develop a work-around before it’s too late for you? I wouldn’t blame you. Are there any among you who would reject a cure for Alzheimer’s that was derived from embryonic stem cell research?

You know, too, that he isn’t terribly bright. You know how he got into and out of Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard. But you also know that you wouldn’t stare a gift horse in the mouth either if you were a fun loving drunk whose daddy was a big shot. Sometimes you think he must be hallucinating. It bothers you to think maybe his huge tax cuts are meant only to make the rich richer. It bothers some of you to see him turning a $236 billion surplus into a $333 billion deficit overnight, in part because of those same tax cuts. If you’re a fiscal conservative, you must be really uncomfortable about his succession of huge budget deficits. Most of all, the evidence of your own eyes tells you that the war on terrorism isn’t going so well. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and some 2,400 American lives. For this we have toppled Saddam but have not caught up with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaida or Mullah Omar of the Taliban. We have not brought peace to Iraq or democracy to the Middle East. We have not affected the ability of the so-called insurgents to kill our soldiers and Iraqi civilians pretty much at will. You (and the generals) know we can’t win unless we seal the Syrian and Iranian borders to prevent the infiltration of Jordanian, Egyptian and Saudi jihadists. And even Mr. Bush knows we no longer have the military resources to do that. You’re doing a great job, Rummy. Next December 19, we will have been at war in Iraq longer than we were in World War II. In dollars, it’s already cost us ten times as much. That’s 67% of World War II’s cost in constant dollars. Wow! And all this in pursuit of a neocon theory of warfare—Shock and Awe—that should have been trashed before the Mission Accomplished fiasco, another Big Lie.

My friends, George W. Bush is a big price to pay even for goals as close to your hearts as reversing Roe v. Wade and eliminating evolution from the curriculum. Judge Roberts is a fine man but one selected more for his confirmability than his dedication to conservative causes. He’s no Judge Bork, Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. As to Sam Alito, time will tell. You are decent people who love your families and your country. You take Jesus seriously. “Love the Lord your God…Love your neighbor as yourself.” Once you felt beleaguered. It seemed that people like me were always looking down on you. George Wallace called us “pointy-headed intellectuals.” But now you have the upper hand. This is your moment. If you think we screwed up our moment, please learn from our mistakes and don’t screw up yours. Do not let yourselves be bamboozled by a chronic liar. Remember, he’s your responsibility. The cold eye of history is on you.

Personally, of course, I think George W. Bush is a serious threat to world peace, democracy, fiscal solvency, civil and human rights and the environment. I think he’s got you hoodwinked. Maybe he does believe in God but more likely he’s just another politician pandering to a base. John’s description of the hypocrite cited above fits George W. Bush perfectly. I know you don’t agree. I know you prefer him to Bill Clinton who was a great President but a public sinner. I will never understand that. Who in the world thinks we’ve been better off under Mr. Bush? Not our European allies. Not our Asian competitors. In fact, no one I can think of except you. I think, my friends, you hope that, as questionable as he is, Mr. Bush will at least set the stage for a true conservative next time. I’m not too worried about that because I believe the next conservative President will be a rational human being, maybe even a Democrat. In other words, I don’t think anyone like Sam Brownback or Rick Santorum can get elected. Your team is already spending millions to prevent Hillary Clinton from retrieving the keys to the White House. I like that because I think you’re wasting your money like you wasted it on her husband’s impeachment. All you got for that investment was your own humiliation in the eyes of the whole world. Okay, you and I see the world differently. But, my friends, we also have a lot in common. And we’re both holding our breaths. Good luck to both of us.