Reading notes

It’s fair to say the history of U.S. foreign policy over the past forty years has been the story of the war between two not-so-secret societies: the neoconservatives and the realists. And it now seems the realists have won another battle — although perhaps not the war.

Lengthy and fascinating history of my favorite orcs, the Neocons.

[via TPM]

In the 2004 election, the boys (and girls) on the bus have been joined by a new class of political arbiters: the geeks on their laptops. They call themselves bloggers. Their mission: to remake political journalism and, quite possibly, democracy itself. The plan: to make an end run around big media by becoming publishers on the Internet.

The best part about blogging for me is I’m finding my voice. Which I find to be vitally important in case I’m given something meaningful to say. As the Boy Scout says at the end of that joke about him fixing the old lady’s car horn, “Beep repaired.”

[via Daily Kos]

Vice President Cheney’s Christmas card this year not only offers best wishes in this holiday season but also bears the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?” Food for thought there: a heavy meal, in fact.

Interpreting what the Lord intended by one thing or another has always been a dicey pastime. Ten years ago, we had one of those outbreaks where lots of people do ridiculous things and then claim it was because the Lord told them to. … There was so much of that kind of thing going around, I developed a theory about a dangerous Lord impersonator being on the loose.

I’m not saying that either Cheney or Franklin has heard from a Lord Impersonator, but just for starters on this empire biz, it was the Roman Empire that crucified Jesus.

Man, I love Molly and her sense of humor.

Since the war started, more than 2,300 American soldiers in Iraq have been hurt in combat, many by artillery shells and homemade bombs that spray shrapnel. Bulletproof vests and helmets protect vital organs. But as the insurgency continues, doctors say that severe facial injuries, along with wounds to the arms and legs, are becoming a hallmark of this war. …

The inchlong piece of steel, part of the artillery shell’s casing, sliced through [Sergeant Feldbusch’s] right eye, tumbled through his sinuses and lodged in the left side of his brain, severely damaging the optic nerve of his left eye and spraying bone splinters throughout his brain.

Two weeks later, at the Brooke Army Medical Center, doctors removed the shrapnel and reconstructed his face with titanium mesh and a lump of fat from his stomach in place of his missing eye, so the hole would not cave in.

Listen to me: Jeremy Feldbusch could be my brother or my son. In fact, in God’s economy, he is my brother and my son. Mr. Bush: Stop hurting my family. Stop destroying my country. You are accomplishing nothing that is worth this.

Real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn’t represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves. …

These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility, ecumenical understanding and blurry boundaries.

If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they’d probably embrace.

Oh, God, can this be true? Am I just stuck in an inflexibly conservative evangelical backwater — either real or of my own imagining — that keeps me from seeing this larger reality of acceptance?

I long for ecumenical understanding as I struggle to not be part of the problem. I always accepted the blurry boundaries until this Bush Debacle crossed the Utterly Unacceptable line with me. I long for those days of blurry acceptance in which we can actually come together and worship.

Alas, I’m not yet able to be as hopeful as Allen from whom this link comes.

[via The Right Christians]

The Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, was scathing about Blair’s military alliance with Bush in Iraq. He likened them to a pair of mavericks fighting crime in multi-racial inner-city London.

“For Bush and Blair to go into Iraq together was like a bunch of white vigilantes going into Brixton to stop drug-dealing. This is not to deny there’s a problem to be sorted, just that they are not credible people to deal with it,” he told The Independent newspaper. …

Wright said the religious conservatives surrounding Bush espouse “a very strange distortion of Christianity” while the fact “some of them stand to benefit financially from the reconstruction of Iraq” made their motives suspicious.

It’s this strange distortion of Christianity with which I can’t bring myself to be associated. It’s really not following Jesus at all, but its practitioners act like they’ll shoot you for pointing that out. Maybe I’ll get past where I am to participate toward an undistorted resolution; if I’m making progress it’s way slower than I’d hoped.

[via The Right Christians]