...another Southern governor is threatening to win the Iowa GOP caucuses based on his stance as a little known, likable, evangelical Christian...

(wait for it)

..."compassionate conservative".

Will we get fooled again?

But America is sick and tired of the politics of fear.

But really, how many chances do you get to use words like "ignominy"?  Bush has really allowed all of us to explore the outer reaches of our vocabulary.

Particularly appropriate when referring to someone who has done such a spectacular job of continuing the destabilization of the Middle East.

people get the 5 dollar words.  You always want to use the 50-cent words, but sometimes they just don't really have the historical reach.

I'm working on a post that uses the word "putrescence".  Word-Geek Joy overload!

Nice catch on the Yeats reference!  I wondered if people would catch that.

The Second Coming -

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and all about reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.  The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."  The man had the knack and his placement of the scene in the Middle Eastern desert - what could be more apropos?

Another poet I really love is Wilfrid Owen, the doomed young British officer who never made it home alive, dying in a pointless military action in the waning days of WWI.  Here's a favorite poem he wrote about pride:

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Not to poke the bear on this one, but... Certainly we could debate whether the US was founded on the Christian religion, but referencing treaties might prove problematic for your argument. No existing version of that treaty in Arabic contains the text you mention.  Even more damaging for your argument is the definitive treaty of our nation's existence: The Treaty of Paris which begins:

In the name of the most holy and undivided Trinity.

It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the grace of God, king of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, defender of the faith, duke of Brunswick and Lunebourg, arch-treasurer and prince elector of the Holy Roman Empire etc., and of the United States of America, to forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse...

 

to understand the quoted opening phrases of the treaty ("holy and undivided Trinity," and "Divine Providence," and so on and so forth). Such attributions were commonly accepted phrases liberally (pardon the word) sprinkled throughout formal diplomatic correspondence rather like saying "Dear Sir," in a letter today which is also signed "Sincerely," wherein the recipient certainly is not "dear" to the sender, and quite likely the letter is anything but sincere, too.  In other words, the phraseology is a convention of the well-bred, and not definitive evidence of fulsome belief.  

As for the lack of the referenced phrase about Christian nation in the Arabic version, that strikes me, if true, as proving nothing.  Indeed, I would regard THIS terminology as rather significant since it is explicitly included in the English version most likely to be read by the English-speaking Americans.

Is that another way of saying a part of the cultural underpinnings?  

This nation was founded to get AWAY from the merging of religion and government as was manifested in Europe. Dumb people don't realize that. Neither to they realize the evil of state sponsored religion which is really not religion at all, but an additional method used by the state to control the public.

the U.S. Constitution was developed.  It's not relevant unless one is trying to grasp at straws to persuade us about a Christian founding.

The comments of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison about organized religion, and Christianity, are as irreverent as anything Mencken ever wrote.  Adams and Jefferson were most certainly not Christians (though they had great reverence for Christ's teachings).  Washington refused to take communion, indicative of someone who did not believe in the divinity of Christ.

Adams, for example, said:

"We have now, it seems a National Bible Society, to propagate King James's Bible, through all Nations. Would it not be better, to apply these pious Subscriptions, to purify Christendom from the Corruptions of Christianity; than to propagate those Corruptions in europe Asia, Africa and America!" -- letter to Thomas Jefferson, 4 November 1816

http://www.geocities.com/peter...

This is what Adams feared:

"Do you know that The General of the Jesuits and consequently all his Hosts have their Eyes on this Country? Do you know that the Church of England is employing more means and more Art, to propagate their demipopery among Us, than ever? Quakers, Anabaptists, Moravians, Swedenborgians, Methodists, Unitarians, Nothingarians in all Europe are employing understrand [underhand?] means to propagate their sectarian Systems in these States.

The signers of the Treaty of Paris were Adams, Franklin and John Jay.  Jay was religious.  However, Franklin was not a Christian, which means that two of the three signers were not Christians --

In a letter to the Rev. George Whitefield, written in 1753, Franklin said this about Christianity:

"The faith you mention has doubtless its use in the world. I do not desire to see it diminished, nor would I desire to lessen it in any way; but I wish it were more productive of good works than I have generally seen it. I mean real good works, works of kindness, charity, mercy, and public spirit, not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing, and reading, performing church ceremonies, or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments, despised even by wise men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity" (Works, Vol. vii., p. 75).

In a discourse on religious toleration, Franklin said:

"If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practiced it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England blamed persecution in the Romish church, but practiced it upon the Puritans. These found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here [England] and in New England" (Works, Vol. ii., p. 112).

Dr. Franklin and Dr. Priestley were reportedly very close friends. Priestley wrote:

"It is much to be lamented that a man of Franklin's general good character and great influence should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done as much as he did to make others unbelievers" (Priestley's Autobiography, p. 60).

which is not the case, but let's concede that point for the sake of argument.

Is vetoing a bill that will save children's lives Christian?

It seems that those who insists the most about the religious foundations of our country failed the most to practice the values of their religion.

It's the actions that count.  

the first, by, as I recall, Joe Haldeman, was so called because it was an intra-galactic war laid in the future where time-lag meant generations-long battles among the stars, and the warriors who started the fight could never go home. Successive generations of warriors from their own country, arriving to join the fight, were culturally as alien to the originals as the enemy because of the passage of time.

The scenario has eerie resemblances to the Bush-Cheney concept, but Bush is the one in a time warp, his reality is not ours, but is close enough that it persuades the unwary, the weak-minded, and the religious zealots. The same can be said for the entire world-view of Bush-Cheney Republicans. Because it echoes basic fantasies from the Bible and various cultural myths of our distant ancestors, it speaks subliminally to many, especially those ungrounded in a rational education, who fear and therefore hate the rapidly changing modern world.

That is what speaks to their souls: the authoritarianism of the Bush-Cheney Republicans, the relish with which they use scapegoats, the encouragement of violence and hatred, the pretense that there is an elite leadership which deserves outlandish rewards and adulation, while the rest of the population deserves its place of servitude. Thus was it ever, thus will it be, Forever.

Interestingly, the recently released movie "The Golden Compass," brings to the screen the first part of a very subversive triology called "His Dark Materials." Strangely, it explicitly gives away the actual theme of the triology early on, unlike the books. That is, that there is a War coming, and it will be about Free Will.  Free Will versus the authoritarian religious leaders who seek to kill the soul, and turn every person into a compliant, will-less subject. Hmmm.      

By the way, Phillip Pullman may be the best story teller of our generation.

He consciously set out to rebut the nihlism of Narnia and the absence of a moral yardstick in Middle Earth.

If you're a fan, don't miss this interview: It's genius.

which, like all good biography, reveals much of importance about the subject without explicitly telling you what to make of it. The parallels with Milton had occurred to me when I read the book; it never struck me as a "children's story" or young adult fiction per se, despite the age of the heroine. I believe His Dark Materials is destined to be a classic, with the capability of meaning different things to different people, or to the same person at different times... but whatever message one derives, that message will always make Authorities nervous.

is a "children's story" have obviously not read the books.  I agree with you, "His Dark Materials" is destined to become a classic.  I strongly recommend it.

who goes by the screen name "The Grey Havens."

Seriously, though, I strongly disagree that there is any "absence of a moral yardstick in Middle Earth."  Why do you say this?

the Pullman Interview

Several times Pullman reminds me that a work of fiction is not an argument. Perhaps it's safest to say that in "His Dark Materials" he has constructed his own imaginative world so as not to submit to anyone else's. He likes to quote William Blake's line: "I must create a system, or be enslav'd by another man's." His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. 'The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

Again, it's a great profile and certainly worth deep read.

Tolkien doesn't address organized religion.  Lewis does.  Pullman doesn't like Lewis' take, so "His Dark Materials" is a rebuttal.  

Since Tolkien doesn't directly address the issue, there's no dialogue between the two narratives.

I greatly admire both Philip Pullman and JRR Tolkien, love their writings, and see no reason for Pullman to "dis" Tolkien.

and something of a jerk.  Although Tolkien addresses the struggle between good and evil, and his worldview was heavily influenced by his Catholicism, it's clear that he was reaching more into the great themes of classic myths for his inspiration, but also into his own and others' experiences during and after World War I.  Pullman seems to be ignoring the context of Tolkien's invention of Middle Earth, which was WWII.  In Return of the King he shows us a struggling, suffering Frodo and speaks of the way the hobbit adventurers gather together from time to time to talk about their experiences because, like so many other combat veterans, no one else can understand what they're talking about.  Frodo is discounted and underestimated by other hobbits, while Merry, Pippin, and Sam are celebrated as heroes, particularly Merry.  However, among themselves they recognize Frodo as the greatest of them.  I wonder whether Pullman just skimmed through the books.  Trivial, indeed (sniffs imperiously).    

I don't know what that number is.  But the picture intrigued me enough to look up some cigarette statistics.  I could not find sales statistics for the state of Virginia.  So I am just backing into the number of packs sold in the state by dividing the excise tax revenue ($172 million) by 30 cents, which gives us roughly 573.7 million packs a year.  Across the river, D.C. and Maryland levy a dollar per pack.  Raising the cigarette excise tax to a dollar would be $401 million in additional revenue for the state per year assuming current consumption patterns continue.  And even if consumption drops, we still get a health benefit!

You darned tax and spend Democrat! What hubris!

I hope there are some Virginia delegates and senators reading this blog.  It sounds like an idea that merits exploration, not just in VA but in other states as well.