The Osterley Times: And This Guy Wants to Be President?

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

And This Guy Wants to Be President?

This week, we got yet another pitiful lesson in just how craven wannabe presidential hopefuls will be in pandering to their "base" - and how little some of them understand about how to wage and win the "Global War on Terror."

The lesson came from Senator George Allen, the former Republican governor of Virginia, who is widely reported to be seeking his party's nomination for president in 2008.

Senator Allen wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to recommend 3-star general Jerry Boykin to be the new head of the Army's Special Operations command.

For those of you with political amnesia, this is the same Jerry Boykin who appeared in dozens of Christian evangelical churches - often in uniform - to deliver himself of such utterances as:

About his battle with a Somali (Muslim) warlord: "I knew that my God was bigger than his God. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

About the Global War on Terror: "America's enemy is "a spiritual enemy ... called Satan." The enemy will only be defeated, he added, "if we come against them in the name of Jesus ... We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this."

About radical Muslims: "Why do they hate us so much?... The answer to that is because we're a Christian nation."

About President Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there."

Another reminder, were any needed, of how much the far right and fundamentalist Christians are morphing into one. Indeed, Tom DeLay said the other day he was proud of bringing Christianity back into politics.

We shouldn't fool ourselves that these guys don't get the fact that there should be a separation between Church and state; they get where we're all coming from and they fundamentally disagree with us.

DeLay decried the notion that churches are not for politics, asserting that he was motivated to "get out of the church and into the streets and standing for (God's) worldview.

Now with President George W. Bush in office, DeLay said God "is giving us this opporunity to change our culture... He is giving us grand and great opportunities to stand up for him, and he's giving it from the top, the President of the United States, all the way to Pearland.