Who's Hijacking Jesus?
No, not Howard Dean...
it's Dick and Lynne Cheney!

Christ was hijacked long ago, with countless imperial and other brutalities carried out in His name.



It was religious and civil authorities who put their heads together and ended up torturing and executing Him.
Why?
They considered Him to be a danger.
His message directly challenged empire.

"And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"

Nice Christmas card message, NeoCon Crusaders!

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Pat Robertson: God tells me it's Bush in a blowout
so sayeth Maru
Please read Maru's hilarious take on Pat's divinely expired prediction.

Bush is Beatable....Pass It On

Bush is Beatable....Pass It On.

Why Bush May Well Lose in 2004

From Jan 4, 2004 NY Times magazine article:

"...the Bush administration stands very, very far from the foreign-policy mainstream: "....liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration.
.... the administration's claim that 9/11 represents such a decisive break with the past that many of the old principles no longer apply is right -- but the new principles need not be the ones the administration has advanced. A different administration could have adapted to 9/11 in a very different way. And this is why national security should be, at least potentially, such a rich target of opportunity for a Democratic candidate...

So, it seems the Democrats have many reasonable talking points to use to their advantage...

"...Why is so much of the world against us? -- is, in fact, the starting point for the Democratic critique of the Bush administration. The sheer velocity of the change from worldwide sympathy to worldwide antipathy is almost incredible, and while much of the new anger comes from the very nature of our superpower status, the conduct of the Bush administration has plainly had a lot to do with it as well....

Just think about where we might be today if we hadn't alienated most of the civilized world...and if we had paid closer attention to limiting weapons-proliferation as a truly multi-lateral-force (I don't mean the Togos and Latvias--I mean a force with the moral strength of this world.)

".....All the major candidates continue to press the loose-nukes issue as an opportunity to demonstrate that the old distinction between hawk and dove is an artifact of another era. In a major foreign-policy address delivered last month, [Howard] Dean accused the administration of being ''penny-wise and pound-foolish when it comes to addressing the weapons-proliferation threat'' and proposed a tripling of spending in the area -- an idea lifted from the hawkish ''American Security Policy'' document -- with an equal amount to come from America's allies....."

"....''The line of attack is not Iraq, though there'll be some of that. The line of attack will be more, 'What have you done to make us feel safer?' I'm going to outflank him to the right on homeland security, on weapons of mass destruction and on the Saudis,'' whom [Howard] Dean promises to publicly flay as a major source of terrorism. ''Our model is to get around the president's right, as John Kennedy did to Nixon.''...

No doubt-the world changed on 9-11. Was the Bush administration "up to" facing and tackling the multi-faceted and sophisticated task of responding? After experiencing the lead-up to the Iraq war, the thumbing of the nose at the UN, and the aftermath of the initial combat phase, I would have to say they blew it (in a post 9-11 sense).


"...The underlying critique offered by Democratic policy experts is that the Bush administration, for all its bluster about how 9/11 ''changed everything,'' has in fact not adapted to the transformed world into which it has been catapulted and is still chasing after the bad guys of an earlier era. The administration understands war, but not the new kind of multifaceted, globalized war that must be fought against a stateless entity. As Ashton B. Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, puts it, ''We've done one thing in one place'' -- or two, counting Afghanistan. What about the other things in the other places? What about diplomacy, for example? Do we have some means beyond threats of military action to induce Iran and Syria to stop sponsoring terrorists? Do we have some means of persuading the European allies to toughen judicial processes so that terrorism suspects can't walk away -- a United Nations treaty, for example?.."

...but...even with all these facts laid out...even with the knowlege we have the worst President in U.S. history, how could we fathom that the Democrat base could lose the Democrats the 2004 election? How could they blow it? How will they get their act together?

".....Clark understands the lessons of the post-cold-war world as no other candidate does. But the post-cold-war world has already been superseded, at least from the American point of view, by something quite different -- the post-9/11 world...

....The difference between the idea that international law, multilateral institutions and formal alliances enhance our power -- the Wilson-F.D.R.-Truman-Kennedy idea -- and the view that they needlessly constrain our power, is a very important difference indeed.....

..... With the very important exception of Iraq, the major candidates hold essentially the same views. Hawkishness or dovishness on Iraq thus does not correlate with some larger difference in worldview, as, for example, the left and right views on Vietnam once did...... O.K., then, it doesn't. And yet it sure feels as if it does. Iraq has, in fact, become the Democratic manhood test.


...The Democrats seem trapped between two irreconcilable impulses, or litmus tests. This is especially obvious, and painful, with figures like John Kerry, who has tried to have it both ways....You can imagine two very different solutions to the irreconcilable-litmus-test problem. If the capture of Saddam Hussein leads to a rapid improvement of conditions in Iraq, the Democratic litmus test could change, and the party could nominate a candidate who couldn't be stereotyped as soft. And if, alternatively, conditions in Iraq fully disintegrate, the general election litmus test could change, and Howard Dean could prove to have been prescient.....Strong and wrong beats weak and right -- that's the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with..."

Let's remember the quote from the beginning of this article:
"....liberal Democrats, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans have more in common with one another than any of them have with the Bush administration.
Democrats: Capitalize on this fact!

Ralph Hall:
GOP-lite goes full-tilt GOP
An Obvious Move By the "Stop-Dean" Activists in the GOP
(Why are the GOP and DLC trying so hard to stop Dean?)

Tom DeLay hates Howard Dean with a passion...and we know it.
The GOP is attempting to do permanent damage to Howard Dean in the South.

"....House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said Democrats are "reaping what they've sown."
"Their leaders have lined up behind Howard Dean's brand of angry, intolerant politics. They've made their message clear: 'moderates need not apply' and that's a sad trend for a once-great party," DeLay said...."

Perhaps it's high time for politics to fall out into natural lines of ideology.
For example, what on earth is Zell Miller doing calling himself a Democrat...Southern or otherwise? He's a party traitor and belongs with the Republicans... and we know it.

At the same time, Olympia Snow and Lincoln Chafee (just two examples) are
Democrats at heart..and we all know it.

I think we'll be seeing more activity like Ralph Hall's and Jim Jeffords' over the next few years.