A recent column from retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong,  one of this godless heathen’s favorite people of faith. 

Shill moment:  I am glad to pay for content when it’s consistently this thoughtful and full of insight.  If  you appreciate Spong and want to read more and think you might even be willing to pay to do that, go here. First month is free. 

Ok, over to Spong:

June 21, 2006 

Mr. Bush: A Public Embarrassment  

I find myself deeply embarrassed today by the President of the United States. It is a new feeling. I do not pretend to be a Bush fan. I have many disagreements with him on many issues. I do not share or appreciate his political philosophy. I count myself as part of the loyal opposition, and believe that this country is always at its best where there is rigorous public debate. Mr. Bush ran as a “conservative” and he has governed as a conservative. That is a legitimate position even if it is not my position. In other periods of history, such as 1932-1952 liberals have won and have governed from a liberal perspective with conservatives in the opposition. That is not the cause of my present embarrassment. It is also not the first time that I have been embarrassed by my president. I had similar feelings when I had to observe the tawdry behavior of President Clinton misusing the Oval Office with his compliant intern, Monica Lewinsky. I expect better behavior than that from the one into whose hands we, the voters, place the destiny of our nation.  Mr. Bush is now the recipient of that sense of embarrassment that almost reaches the level of being sickening. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Bush has been guilty of some similar sexual indiscretion. Non-sexual behavior, however, can be equally embarrassing and in most cases far more destructive. I now recoil at this president’s blatant and overt act of seeking to rally his political base by turning the wrath of prejudice and fear, always latent in the human psyche, toward a designated victim, in this case the gay and lesbian population of the country.  His motivation is overt and obvious. His ratings in the polls have plummeted to the lowest point of a president in decades. The war in Iraq is going poorly. The casualties continue to mount. The attempt to form a government made up of those who will cooperate with the American military presence is delusional since every poll shows that a vast majority of Iraqis want the Americans out. His words, “mission accomplished,” spoken on the aircraft carrier only a few months after the successful sweep into Baghdad in 2003, have proved to be disastrously empty. His claim to be strong on national security went down the drain when this administration proved to be woefully unprepared to deal with a natural disaster called Hurricane Katrina about which there had been weeks of warning as that storm journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Caribbean. When an administration is that inept in dealing with a natural disaster, its claim to be ready to deal with another terrorist attack, for which there will be no warning, sounds empty. Again the words of an administration badly out of touch with reality haunt this president: “You did a helluva job, Brownie.”    

Next there was the sudden passion to fix the long term immigration problem ignored by this administration for six full years. Mr. Bush’s reluctance to address this issue came because it is splitting his party in two. His southern right wing religious base is made up of the old George Wallace vote where tribal feelings and racial prejudices run deep. They see a tide of brown-skinned Mexicans threatening their economic security and they respond viscerally. They want a fence built along the line between the United States and Mexico. They perfume their racism by saying that this is a ‘national security issue.’ It is noteworthy, however, that no one is proposing a fence across the United States border with Canada, which is equally as porous for those who want access to this nation. The other side of the Republican Party is made up of American business corporations who have long encouraged the illegal hiring of thousands of undocumented laborers, who work for low wages and receive no benefits. These businesses do not want this source of cheap labor either publicized or stopped. It is a battle between prejudice and greed. This administration is now caught in a lose-lose situation and its wiggle room has been greatly diminished.

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