Timothy Egan inspired me in the New York Times this morning with his "The Legacy," an assessment of the presidency of George W. Bush. He made me think. I am whacked by this presidential campaign, because the slow, agonizing demise of the Bush presidency could well be followed by more of the same. His election eight years ago was not only stolen from the people, it was pushed repeatedly by the Roman Catholic bishops of America.
Once again, bishops and cardinals are speaking out about the two candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, and are telling Catholics that a vote for a certain candidate would be a sin. I am disgusted with Roman Catholic bishops, each one of them appointed by the pope, not elected by the people. They ignore the separation of church and state, demand compliance with their declarations of Roman morality, and want to change our democracy into a theocracy. We could call them ward bosses, or theo-neo-cons.
Blasphemy by bishop about carrying the cross of Christ into the voting booth shocks me so, I stutter in embarrassment to profess that I am Catholic. I dislike bishops who think they can run the state the way they run a diocese. I dislike politicians who think they can run the state like bishops. I like my friends who reject the demagoguery of bishops, see no sin in a vote and know they are free to vote as they choose. During this presidential campaign, it is shameful to be cowed by such incompetent leaders of church and state. It is cowardice to remain silent,
I dare stand and speak truth to power. I dare discuss an assessment of the presidency of George W. Bush, whose very election was urged by bishops eight years ago. I dare vote by myself and on my own. I dare reject commands from ward bishops and ward bosses on how to vote. I dare, because voting is neither a sin nor the occasion of sin. It is my right.
I am American. Simply American. For my country needs no limiting qualifier: Black American, White American. I am Catholic. Simply Catholic. For my religion needs no limiting qualifier: Roman Catholic. America is far, far more than White. Catholic is far, far more than Roman. Bishops! Take heed!
Let any Cardinal or Bishop or obedient lay person of the Roman Catholic Church respond. Let any Bush devotee or committed Republican support and defend their leader. Let them please gainsay what Timothy Egan wrote about the Bush presidency. Let them please tell me about the separation of church and state. Let them be accountable for what they say and do, be they president or cardinal. Let them tell me about the sanctity of the confessional in church and the sanctity of the vote in state. Both are mine; one a sacrament, the other an unalienable right.
To any bishop or cardinal who dares to listen:
- Please, do not interfere with our conscience in the Confessional.
- Please do not interfere with our precious freedom to cast our vote for our choice as the next president of the United States.
- Please do what shepherds do: advise, teach, bless, as only a bishop can.
- Please do not accuse us of sin or disobedience or lack of respect for your authority, publicly from the pulpit or through the media.
- Please know that your power is not absolute.
- Please remember that you have no standing to accuse.
- Please be accountable.
- Please sit and be still and know that our God is.
- Please realize: What you are thunders so loud, we cannot hear what you say.
We should try to be open to read and hear something good and decent about George W. Bush' presidency, lest we fall into invincible ignorance and are doomed to hell by intransigent arrogance. We have to make an assessment of this administration, in order to decide which one to vote for as the next. We may not be able to comprehend how George W. Bush became president, was reelected, and then allowed to continue in office, when we almost impeached a president who had oral sex. And lied about it.
Pelvic sins, whether in church or state, seem to outweigh all others, so far up on the scale of mortal, that they alone are supreme and the rest descend into just being venial, i.e. human, with a couple of peccadilloes, such as destruction of the unalienable rights of humanity and mass destruction of humanity, not merely here in our own country, but in any defenseless country our president chose to invade and obliterate in the name of democracy and freedom. And lied about it.
Before we vote for the next president then, we must resolve the following:
- What is our assessment of President George W. Bush?
- Are we right about the man we elected twice to lead us.?
- Are we wrong?
- Are we insane?
- Is our country better than it was eight years ago?
- Are we better off now than then?
- Do we still have our unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
- Have any of those rights been alienated?
- Are we free?
- Is our nation secure from its enemies?
- Is America capable of leading the world?
- Will the next four years, perhaps eight, restore what we and our country have lost?
- Will the next president preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America?
A personal note. I want to spend the rest of my life observing and commenting on religion and the rule of law, a/k/a church and state, but I am afraid that a diminishment of the separation of church and state has already begun. It may be the most dangerous terrorism for America. From within.
The leaders in both church and state are much alike, so disdainful, arrogant, unaccountable, privileged, comfortable in what is to them near absolute power, cruel by an indifference more cruel than cruelty.
Were I to give up that dream I know the descent would be rapid into the dark of despair. What keeps me is the hope that our country will be true to its Constitution and our churches true to their scriptures. Some people profess a religion. Some do not. Religion and the rule of law are compatible. Church and state are separate. Pluralism is a fact.
Please, then, a commendation for or a refutation of Timothy Egan's "The Legacy." If neither former nor latter, then at least a distinction of his points, one at a time. If no response, then Mr. Egan is an accurate observer of this president? And we should give heed? Lest we go right on ahead and willingly repeat the last eight years, so as to enable the end-times of the fall and decline of the American Empire?
Our choices are but two. Perhaps three, should one of the two be unable to continue to lead and preside.
Think -- Are we really the greatest nation on this earth? Honestly? Really?
Is it all possible for us to put aside our preferences for liberal or center or conservative – truly – simply – honestly -- and try to take an impassioned, almost objective look at the President of the United States, if only to see him for what he is? For what he has done? For what he has failed to do?
With our bishops maintaining separation of church and state and staying out of this campaign process,
- Let us not dismiss Timothy Egan's opinion without reading it.
- Let us not read it through smeared lenses of our hypocrisies.
- Let us not dismiss the opinions of any Republican, Democrat, Independent.
Let us also lay down our scorns for other presidents:
- Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
- Argentina's Hugo Rafael Chávez.
What if we were to stand three of them up on a stage? Now. Before the election. To help us in our assessment of the past eight years and our decision for the next.
Their labels read – America, Argentina, Iran. Strobes flash on each one as he blinks, then smiles. Then the stage lights come up on high, slowly, background music swelling and rising in pitch and tone.
The announcer, a professional in dress and demeanor, intones, "Will the real President please step forward?"
What if……?
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Attached is Timothy Egan's "The Legacy."
About him:
Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America.
Mr. Egan is the author of five books, including "The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest," and "Lasso the Wind, Away to the New West." He lives in Seattle.
October 1, 2008, 9:45 pm
The Legacy
By Timothy Egan
Among the many dispiriting things to come out of Bob Woodward's quartet of books on George W. Bush is his observation that the president has not changed since he first started talking to Woodward in 2001.
No growth. No evolution. No regrets.
"History," Bush replied, when asked by Woodward how he would be judged over time. "We don't know. We'll all be dead." Broke, as well.
It would have been nice to let Bush's two terms marinate a while before invoking Herbert Hoover and James Buchanan from the cellar of worst presidents. But then — over the last two weeks — he completed the trilogy of national disasters that will be with us for a generation or more.
George Bush entered the White House as a proponent of a more humble foreign policy and a believer that government should get out of the way at home. He leaves as someone with a trillion-dollar war aimed at making people who've hated each other for a thousand years become Rotary Club freedom-lovers, and his own country close to bankruptcy after government did get out of the way.
It's a Mount Rainier of shame and folly. But before going any further, let's allow his supporters to have their say.
"He's going to have an unbelievably great legacy," said Laura Bush in an ABC interview, citing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Fifty million people liberated from very brutal regimes."
Fred Barnes argues that Bush is a visionary on a par with Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Bush is a president who leads," he wrote in a 2006 book. "He controls the national agenda, uses his presidential power to the fullest and then some, prepares far-reaching polices likely to change the way Americans live, reverses other long-standing polices and is the foremost leader in world affairs."
Finally, from Karl Rove, the Architect. Bush will be viewed "as a far-sighted leader who confronted the key test of the 21st century," he said.
After wading through books with words like "fiasco," "hubris" and "denial" in the title, historians will go to first-hand sources, the people who worked with Bush daily. There they will find Paul O'Neill, the president's former Treasury secretary. In 2002, he sounded an alarm, saying Bush's rash economic policies could lead to a deficit of $500 billion. This, after Bush had inherited a budget surplus, prompted many to scoff at O'Neill.
He was wrong, but only in one respect – the projected deficit, even without a financial bailout, will almost certainly be higher.
This means a lot, for every bridge not built, every Pell grant not given to a kid who may never go to college without one, every national park road left to crumble, every sick person who cannot afford to see a doctor in a country that wants to be known as the best on earth.
Historians will also go to Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary. Bush may not be a "high functioning moron," as Paul Begala called him recently. He is "plenty smart enough to be president," McClellan wrote this year. But McClellan, in his job as the president's mouthpiece, found him chronically incurious. He also said Bush deliberately misled the country into war, and in that effort, the news media were "complicit enablers."
Historians will recall that in each of the major disasters on Bush's watch, there were ample warnings — from the intelligence briefing that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike a month before the lethal blow, to the projections that Hurricane Katrina could drown a major American city, to the expressed fears that letting Wall Street regulate itself could be catastrophic.
Voluntary regulation. That phrase now joins "heckuva job, Brownie" and "mission accomplished" among those that will always be associated with the Bush presidency.
It's painful now to realize, just as the economy craters and the world looks aghast at the United States, that the other cancer from the Bush presidency – his failure to even start the nation on the road to a new energy economy – gets short-changed during the triage of his final days.
Bush has hinted that his legacy will be about the war. So be it. He never caught bin Laden, the mass murderer who launched the raison d'être of the Bush presidency.
But he did topple a paper army in Iraq, opening the drainage for our currency, blood and global reputation. It may go down as the longest, even costliest war in our history.
In a survey of scholars done earlier this year, just two of 109 historians said the Bush presidency would be judged a success. A majority said he would be the worst president ever.
But if you don't trust those elites in academia, consider the president's own base.
Bush leaves with his party in tatters. In the 28 states that register by affiliation, Democrats have picked up more than 2 million new voters this year while Republicans have lost 344,000. It seems only fitting that it was the last of the Bush dead-enders in Congress earlier this week who jumped ship when presented with the final horrendous hangover from this man who doesn't drink.
If ever there was an argument for voting against politicians who are confident about their cluelessness, Bush is it. So it was heartening to see that a majority of the country, in some polls, now views Sarah Palin as unqualified to be president.
We may have learned something, even if Bush has not.
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