"El Rusho," The Real GOP Chairman

John McCain once called Rush Limbaugh a Bozo and then apologized--but not to Limbaugh, but to Bozo for making the comparison. (Fox News 2005)Too bad that GOP Chairman Michael Steele doesn't have the same cojones. After rightly denouncing Limbaugh's "incendiary" and "divisive" rhetoric, he submissvely, pusillanimously retracted his remarks and thereby turned over the leadership of the Republican Party to "El Rusho."

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The Rush Limbaugh Conservative Dregs

Why the Conservative Political Action Committee would choose Rush Limbaugh as the keynote speaker at their 2009 national convention is beyond comprehension. “El Rusho,” admittedly, is a good entertainer, a comedian of sorts, but he is no political or social sage by any stretch of the imagination.

Listen to one of his radio shows for its full three hours--the staged phone calls, the prepared scripts, the tortured statistics, the non-sequiturs, the twisted logic, the half-baked ideas, the gasping changes of direction in mid thought, the out-of- context sound bytes, the wrong predictions, the baseless information, the name-calling, false piety, blustering, mockery, sniggering—and nothing of substance shows through.

John McCain had it right when he called Limbaugh a Bozo and then apologized to Bozo for making the comparison. (Fox News, 2005)

That the CPAC would hold Rush Limbaugh in such a high esteem shows how low their intellectual standards have plummeted. Small wonder that so many fiscal and free-thinking conservatives are parting company with the CPAC. The leftists bent on taking over the Nation couldn’t be happier. All they need to do is sit back and let the CPAC unwittingly deliver to it them.

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Why The Terrorist Haven't Attacked

Why hasn’t America been attacked since 9/11? Connect the dots:

Al-Qaeda operates in small cells largely ignorant of one-another. Arrest the members of one cell and no amount of interrogation can coerce them into providing reliable information on where other cells are located or what they are planning next. Individual cell members communicate not only in code but in a languages and dialects unknown to our security agencies. They do not have to sneak in from abroad because they are already here, legally, most having entered the U.S. on student visas, as did the did all twenty 9/11 suicide terrorists. They have no qualm about losing their lives. They do not require massive weaponry or high tech devices. Recall how the “Beltway Snipers,” John Muhammed and Lee Malvo, terrorized millions with nothing but an old car and a hunting rifle. Small squads of Al-Qaeda operatives deployed thorough the country could easily do the same on a much larger scale.

<[>So why haven’t they struck? Because it wouldn’t be in their best interest. For all intent and purposes, they have already won their war. They have rendered air travel an unpleasant ordeal. They have forced us to squander billions and lose face abroad by sucking us into a mindless invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have helped fuel our economic decline. They have kept us on edge and suspicious of our institutions for eight years. Another 9/11 would only bring the nation together under a common cause, the last thing in the world al-Qaeda wants. For all the billions invested in state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and trained personnel, Homeland Security has done little to prevent another 9/11. They cannot be given credit for it. The reason the terrorists are holding back is that for now have no good reason to attack.

The only effective way to deal with them is to pay them off, line the pockets of their leaders, as were are now doing with the Sunni insurgents in raq (the only reason the Surge worked) and the puppet rulers of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Hopefully, al-Qaeda and their ilk will overtime wise up and come into the fold of civilized society.

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Whom are we bailing out? The creators of wealth or the makers of money?

Question: Who, exactly, are we rescuing with these billion dollar bailouts and tax breaks? The average wage earner, the main-street consumer, the small business owner, local banks, our manufacturing and service industries--i.e., the creators of real wealth? Or are we coming to the rescue of hedge fund moguls, rapacious CEO’s and Wall Street speculators--i.e., the parasitical makers of money for its own sake?

Myth has it that both camps are integral parts of the great, all-American, free-market system: But, as the currently economic crisis has clearly shown, they are not. The true creators of wealth cannot possibly thrive until freed from the tentacles of parasites masquerading as entrepreneurs. Before I endorse any Federal stimulus plan with my vote, I’d like to know exactly whose side our Government is on.

(Recall how the only time that Jesus lost his cool was when he drove the money changers out the Temple, with a whip he fashioned himself.)

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Sarah Palin: Please Go Away

Would somebody please inform Sarah Palin that she lacks the education and gravitas to serve as President of the United States; that her barracuda, bulldog, hockey mom persona is a joke; that even if elected to high office, her off-the-wall comments, religious biases and family scandals would render her the laughing stock of the civilized world; that it wasn't the news media but the caricaturesque image she projected during the primaries that turned public opinion against her; that her political meddling is obstructing the efforts of true conservatives to check the Nation's headlong rush into Socialism. Sarah Palin had her moment of fame. Now it time for her to go back to caribou country.

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Hillary Confirmation Hearings--A New Low in American Politics

I find it incredible that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee panelists conducting the confirmation hearings of Secretary of State nominee Hillary Clinton have neglected to bring up her and her husband’s long history of corruption and sleaze: Whitewatergate, Pardongate, Cattle-futuresgate, Chinagate, Filegate, Fellatiogate, the using of uniformed marines as waiters, the plundering of White House property, the Impeachment and near conviction, the punitive IRS audits, the violent deaths of potentially incriminating witness.

Nor did fawning panelists—Hagel, Kerry, Luger, Boxer, Finegold, et al.—recall that her only attempts at running anything—her 1994 health care reform program in 1994 and recent primary campaign—collapsed from within for lack of leadership and management skills. .

And they did not consider that unlike former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice, Madelaine Albright, Jim Baker, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Dean Rusk, John Foster Dulles and, harking back to the first one to hold that office, Thomas Jefferson, the former First Lady lacks the educational and cultural gravitas to represent our nation abroad. Her lawyering in Arkansas and unremarkable stint in Congress do not qualify her for even the lowest cabinet post. Of the 20 bills she introduced and managed to get passed in her eight year as U.S. Senator, 16 were for inconsequential fluff, like honoring individuals, naming post offices and courthouses, and congratulating lacrosse teams. She did get 18 million votes in the Democratic primaries, probably more than Obama, but a large proportion of those votes were cast by radical feminists and the less educated, hardly the constituency whose support lends credibility to a Secretary of State.

The only panelist opposing Hillary Clinton’s nomination, David Vitter, is doing so for the wrong reasons. Seems that the Senator from Louisiana is more troubled by her husband’s financial entanglements than by her meager qualifications.

I supported, trusted Barack Obama, until he made the Faustian pact of nominating Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. God help his Presidency! God help America!

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Paul the Anti-Christ

(Excerpt from a short story by the author)

On the way back home Ortega slowed down for a panel truck pulling into a gas station. The truck's rear bumper bore a sticker that read: "Honk if you love Jesus," and his thoughts again turned to the Bible. Which Jesus did the driver of the truck love? The liberating, forgiving, anticlerical Jesus of the Gospels, or the theocratic, judgmental Jesus of Paul's Epistles?

Ortega had always been troubled by the stark disconnect between the Gospels and the parts of the New Testament penned by Paul. He recalled an annotation he once had made on the back leaf of a Bible-study booklet on Paul's Epistle to the Romans:

"This contradicts everything that Jesus taught in the Gospels. He clearly did not intend to create a church. The Kingdom of God, he said, was 'within you' (Luke 17:21). So you don't need intermediaries to show you the way to Heaven. All you needed to do is believe in him. His apostles were not professional priests or theologians. Their mission was to spread his Gospel, not by preaching, but by example: 'Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.' (Matthew 5:16) Preaching was the Lord's job alone, and he had already done all the preaching that was necessary. As described by those who knew him personally, his ministry was largely a condemnation of the organized religion of his time. When he died on the cross, the curtain to the Holies of Holies, the exclusive domain of the high priest, was rent. (Matthew 27:51)"

"Now here enter the tentmaker from Tarsus, claiming to have been visited in a vision and ordained by Christ to speak on his behalf, then rebuking the true apostle Peter, preaching out both sides of his mouth, one side praising Christ while the other refuting and confounding his simple message, elliptically telling the faithful that they were spiritually unqualified to comprehend its mysteries, denouncing intellectual curiosity, fomenting guilt, fabricating a new church; in effect, resurrecting the priesthood, restoring the Holy of Holies and thereby laying the foundation for the collective fanaticism that gave rise the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch hunts and other crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of a loving Christ."

The recollection of the tent maker's duplicitous rhetoric was causing Ortega to speed up and start ranting again. But he checked himself and, glancing at the truck with the "Honk if You Love Jesus" bumper sticker, now pulling up to a gas pump, he calmly resumed his theological musing.

"In 1 John, the writer, like Peter, an apostle who had known Jesus personally, alludes to a rift that had developed among believers and to the existence of an Anti-Christ that 'is now already in the world' distorting the teachings of Christ. And in Revelation (19:20) the same writer (?) depicts him as a false prophet meant to be destroyed and cast into the fires of Hell."

Suddenly, as in a counter epiphany to Paul's, it occurred to Ortega that this Anti-Christ was none other than Paul himself. "What better way for the Anti-Christ to insinuate himself than by becoming a writer of the New Testament? What better way to keep the faithful duped and disoriented for two millennia?"

But then the epiphany ceded to common sense: "On second thought, Paul may have been right after all. At the gut level, the mass of humankind prefers the security of a well-organized group, however despotic, to the risks inherent in personal freedom—the herd instinct. Maybe by recasting Christ as a leader rather than a liberator the tentmaker from Tarsus saved Christianity from extinction—as I saved that cat from ending up as a bloody smear on the asphalt."

Felipe Ortega wasn't sure which Jesus the driver of the truck with the "Honk if You Love Jesus" bumper sticker worshipped, but he honked anyway.

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