HAUNTING MORAL DILEMMAS * WE'RE AS SICK AS OUR SECRETS

Jane Hamsher: DC Journalists Love GOP Obstructionists, But Americans Don't!

There appears to be a pretty big gap between what DC journalists think Americans think, and what Americans actually think. No better example of this can be found than the "winners" and "losers" that DC media are proclaiming in the wake of the passage of the stimulus bill, and what DailyKos/Research 2000 polling on the subject indicates. Read more at Huffington Post
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We're as sick as our secrets...
THE READER is a film that will not stop haunting me. I often think about moral dilemmas, but this one is a puzzle. Below is my analysis of what I consider the best film of the year. Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen it yet, please do not read the review. But first a few items:
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"Some of the poorest people in the world will never know the name Barbara Lee, yet owe their lives to her determination in the fight against AIDS. Her sense of justice — and injustice — runs about as deep as it's possible to go." - Bono, lead singer of U2 and cofounder of the anti-poverty organization ONE.

On Monday February 16, 2009, Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee will be the guest on the Basham and Cornell Radio Show at 8 am Pacific Time on AM 1230 KLAV in Las Vegas.

Lee gained national attention in 2001 as the only member of congress to vote "No" on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), stating that she voted no not because she opposed military action but because she believed the AUMF, as written, granted overly-broad powers to wage war to the president at a time when the facts regarding the situation were not yet clear.

Lee is the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and was the Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Her new book is titled “Renegade for Peace and Justice: Congresswoman Barbara Lee Speaks for Me.”

Ad: From the Las Vegas Review Journal

Basham and Cornell Radio Show at 8 am Pacific Time on AM 1230 KLAV in Las Vegas and simulcast worldwide on the web.

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THE READER ... a review by Lydia Cornell

"There's an often-heard saying in the recovery community: “We're as sick as our secrets.” Over the years, I have met many people in abusive situations who have paid a great price to eventually extricate themselves from the vicious cycle of manipulation and recrimination. Sexual and physical abuse, in particular, scars the victim deeply. Often the victims falsely blame themselves. Recovery from abuse involves breaking the conspiracy of silence and deception perpetrated by abusers. Only the truth, however painful, can really set us free. Secrecy keeps us chained to our abusers.

At the heart of the ‘twelve steps’, in Step Four and Five, is the willingness to break the power of secrecy by admitting to God, yourself, and another person the exact nature of how you have wronged other people. Until we can open up and get such things off our chest, we are still stuck with guilt, recrimination, and self-doubt. We really are as sick as our secrets." The Rev. Ed Hird

If Hanna Schmitz, played by Kate Winslet, hadn't been so ashamed of not being able to read, she wouldn’t have preyed upon weaker people and manipulated them. Of course her pathology would have manifested in other ways — which goes along with my theory that many of us are controlled by our ancient wounds, our "woundedness" — and this perverts itself in devious ways. Our low self-esteem, our feeling "less than" others — results in various kinds of retaliation such as gun-shootings on school campuses.

There is another level of subconscious political jealousy going on here: Hanna was uneducated, and of a lower class than the very Jews in her prison camps, who had learned to read.

Hitler had brainwashed the Hitler Youth into believing that Jews were the ones taking away German’s rights, money and education. But to begin with, the mere fact that "not being able to read” is her deepest shame – deeper than murder – makes her a peculiar brand of sociopath. She blindly follows the party line, like any authoritarian follower. She either believed that Jews were less than human beings — or she didn't even think about it, as her indoctrination would confirm.

Is Hanna a sociopath? A pedophile/rapist? A cold-hearted narcissist? I was considering how I would feel about a loved one who had once been a Nazi prison guard and had allowed women to burn alive in a church. What if Hanna had been one of my relatives, who thought nothing of murdering Muslims and abortion doctors because she was brainwashed listening to Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or Michael Savage or Mark Levin (or Lou Dobbs) all day on right wing hate radio – and had been convinced that abortion is a sin and crime, and that she was doing the right thing in killing live human doctors in order to save innocent fetuses — and you had no idea of this years earlier?


Hana represents Germany itself. Survivor guilt and all the bad feelings toward Germany are contained in her resigned expression. In other words, Hanna represents all Germans, Christians and death-camp guards who were just there following orders without thinking too deeply. Germany itself is culpable for being so passive as a nation – in not stopping this evil. The boys’ family, everyone was responsible, not just a few guards.

The film reminds us that all the German people knew what was happening, yet they did nothing to stop Hitler. Even the Christian churches were complict. Except for a few courageous souls who hid Jews, protested or fled —  the German people were all guilty. This was their shame.

Again, we are only as sick as our secrets. Here is why "The Reader" is so profound to me:

1. If Hanna hadn’t has such shame about not being able to read, she wouldn’t have preyed on weaker people and manipulated them. Her shame ultimately did her in. If not for her secret, she wouldn’t have taken the boy under her wing. She did everything for self-serving interest of “being read to.” (Side note: Later, it would be one thing if the books he was sending to her in prison were books of the Holocaust or Anne Frank – or books that would make her sympathetic to the Jews whom she had killed, but he was reading her some very bourgeouise books.)
2. This is a striking character flaw of the alcoholic, who is ego-riddled: the tendency to hide a bad motive under a good motive. All for selfish interests.
3. Her shame ultimately did her in. But to begin with , not being able to read, being her deepest shame and longing – the only way she can live with herself and maintain the secret (either secret) is to remain aloof and cold. You must keep your distance from people if you want to keep your secrets.

But again, the author makes a point: everyone was doing it; everyone In Germany, especially the Christians in whose church we were meeting in.

The only way she could live with herelf was to be cold and aloof; to cut hersef off from human emotion. She could only move forward with the bad habits of the past, the survival habits. We don’t change that easily. It takes a while for our mind to match our actions. Old habits die hard. Okay, so let’s say Hanna shut a part of herself off from feeling the horrors of her past. Let’s say she has tried to numb herself, convince herself she was obeying orders, doing the right thing.

Why is she any more guilty than every other German during the war?

The grown-up lover played by Ralph Fiennes, was also guilty of judging Hanna. He did not freely forgive. Instead of redemption, he judged her. He had a chance to do what Christ did, and forgive her, love her, heal her. That’s all anyone ever needs anyway. We are all judging each other, but do we really know what kind of background or childhood the person has been through?

We are all judging each other, but what do we really know?

Ralph Fiennes couldn’t forgive he and wouldn’t hug her. In prison, when she was an old woman, he asked her accusingly , “What did you learn?”

“I learned to read.” She said very coldly after saying it didn’t matter what she said because "the dead were already dead." She showed no heart or feelings after 20 years in prison.

Ralf Fiennes stiffened; he judged her. He got up to leave and she tried to make a gesture to hug him but he withdrew his affection. By pulling away from her, he sealed her fate. The way she reached out with her shoulder in such small subtle moves, was humbling on her part. It was “acquiescence.”

Now, questions:

“I learned to read” she said, very coldly, without any remorse or compassion.
a. Did Hanna actually gain a conscience? Did she read any deep books on this -- or just bourgeiouse fluff?
b. Could she have deliberately said this to test him?

Okay – some choices:
A. His rebuff of her hug shows her that there was no purpose in life for her. She would be worse off in the normal, non-prison world. Everyone would hate her.

*** B. She loved him. Her love for him, their love — and his rebuff — ultimately made her see herself clearly – that she couldn’t live with herself. LOVE HEALED HER HEART. It made her see her crimes clearly because they caused her lover to hate her. She woke up and was able to kill herself as her final gesture of love. This action of killing herself was a gift to her lover. It validated him in the real world too. It made all his actions seem noble. By knowing him, she was changed and awakened.

Killing herself was her first and only selfless act: it was proof that she had learned by his love, that he had served a purpose and had not lived his life in vain. It was also a way to free his soul. And she knew it was the only way she could live anymore — without secrets, totally "seen."

C. Love had made her become whole, but ashamed, perhaps for the first time ever in real life. Perhaps she had never been loved or trusted to do the right thing before this man came into her life and messed up the compartments she had so neatly kept separate.

Perhaps as a Hitler Youth, she had never seen the world through another lens. She had her life kept in separate parts, pushing down feelings and conscience and moral certitude. Pushing down the truth and intuition. (As many neocons do.) That’s how she coped with life: her job as a guard was to protect prisoners from escaping; to prevent chaos at all costs. The German efficiency. Moral choices had no place here. Emotion and morality had no overlap. This was always respected in her youth and at work. She was so honest in the trial because she had nothing to hide. These were the facts and the laws of the time. You do not disobey orders.

Who knows? She may have been on of the Hitler Youth that ratted and turned on their parents.

But here’s the rub: "I think the big question in the book is how is it possible to love your parents, your pastors, your teachers or, indeed in the circumstance used in the book, your lover who has been involved in such a terrible past, whether as a direct perpetrator or as a bystander? How is it possible to love?" Daldry explains. "We were trying to be very clear about the degrees of her moral illiteracy, whether it is the relationship with a minor or what she was engaged in in the [concentration] camps. We tried to keep her ambiguous, not totally understood or understandable; but obviously we were very concerned about how to calibrate the sympathy towards her without ever allowing her to get off the hook."

Winslet believes the film neither condemns nor condones the Hanna Schmitz character, which puts the viewer in the position of deciding.

"We didn't want to give answers," notes Winslet. "We only wanted to ask questions and have an audience walk away questioning everything and possibly questioning their own morals if, even for one split second, they felt any empathy for Hanna Schmitz. I knew it wasn't my job to try to make an audience sympathize with her or humanize her or warm her up. I had to make her a person. I had to make her real."


But it makes one wonder: where was her moral conscience and heart? Why and how could it have been so hardened? How could she have locked those women in the church – and still gone to the church in the country and not be bothered by her conscience? Separate compartments.

On their country bike ride, “Love saves a soul.” Hana admitted she loved him. “Only love can save you.”

* Hitler Youth indoctrination made her cold, unfeeling, robotic, German
* It is possible, this cold aloofness is her way of being the counterpart or opposite to love.
* Because she has never felt love, or been treated with love, she doesn't know love.
* Out at the country church, Hanna sits down to hear the beautiful voices of children singing, never once letting on that she has another separate compartment where she puts "dead church people." She has not allowed her two sides to merge here.


We are all guilty – all of Germany is guilty – Do not judge one another. By Him judging her at the end, he has her fate in his hands. He is being the guard at that point. He has the power to end her life or make her live with his own brand of shame. He has manipulated her with reading gifts, just to try to get her to redeem herself and say she’s sorry. He was manipulative too – she was his first love. He kept hoping to save her, hoping she was redeemable. The moment she disappointed him by not answering the way he wanted, he closed the door on Love and withdrew his love. He judged her, He was not compassionate toward her.

NO MATTER how much Hanna “deserved” her fate and guilt and shame – it is still not the Christ idea - "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The ultimate loving end to the circle of life would be to forgive your fellow man. He should not have had to force Hanna to take that test. To break the cycle of the Holocaust, he should have simply loved her. His love would have saved her life. But he couldn’t forgive her. He was not God and did not know the depth of her shame. But he demanded her to have the same sense of shame and regret he would have. He demanded her to have learned the lesson on his timetable and in his style. If he had wanted her to realize her sin, I wonder why he recorded so many tapings of frivolous books for her to listen to.

So, were as sick as our secrets. The Ralph Fiennes character breaks the cycle of secrets. With his daughter, he is guilty of being equally secretive, which could be fatal to them both. His secret shame of having been lovers with this Nazi guard has kept him distant and locked off from his daughter. He finally takes her to Hanna's grave and tells her the whole story.

We must not hold ourselves above others and separate from others in the human race -- because we are all ONE. Love is our unifying principle. We all have love as our true source, but we have forgotten. Love created us and we are here to love and accept ourselves and transfer that love and acceptance to others.

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I just have to congratulate ROBERT PLANT (photo below; in his heyday he was beyond gorgeous) ALISON KRAUSS and COLDPLAY for their Grammy wins. I have always loved Robert Plant, and Coldplay is my favorite!! I'm also glad Adele won for her brilliant "Chasing Pavements." Have you seen Adele's heart-wrenching video?

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Photo: Jim Hillis and me

Full Circle: My good friend Jim Hillis was in town last week. Once a male model, he's still stunning — and you can read some of his brilliant pieces on CNN.com. He's a humanitarian and amazing human being, who was in town to help a few homeless women get their benefits and restore their dignity. His partner Tommy is also a total sweetheart!
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WHY WE'RE ANGRY

Just got this letter from John Conley, the Marine combat Vet (who sent me his Purple Heart, God bless him!)

Dear Lyd,

What Imus said was inexcusable and deserving of decisive punishment, but more inexcusable to me is the ongoing urgency to completely destroy his life and the very positive things he and his wife have built to help kids fight cancer. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have both needed forgiveness in the past for racial slurs and incidents (Jackson with his anti-semitic "Hymietown" remark in describing New York City and Sharpton with the Tawana Brawley myth he rushed into and helped perpetuate.)........both incidents just as inciteful, if not more, than anything Don Imus has said or done.

In this case not only is there no forgiveness, but the punishment grossly outweighs the offense and a feeding frenzy has developed among bored journalists trying to uncover new excuses to hammer Imus even harder. The theory seems to be that If you want to prove you're not a racist, then step up and take your pound of flesh from Don Imus. I fear the pendulum is now swinging a little too far the other way.

John
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Part of being a public figure or celebrity means dealing with unsolicited opinions about yourself. On this blog as well as on others, I have been stung and hurt to the core by cruel, sexist comments. The first time it happened, my cheeks stung and I burst into tears, feeling lower than I had in my entire life. I can't imagine what these young Rutgers women must have felt like after working hard to get to college, to earn their place on the Rutgers team, to make it to the finals — only to be dismissed as whores (no matter the catchy slang, "ho's" means one thing and applies to the worst thing men can call women.) Black women have it harder than any other group; they have been marginalized, forsaken, forgotten and maligned and yet they have such dignity and innate beauty in the face of unbearable hardship.

Imus lost his MSNBC show, a signal that sexist, racist hate-speak will not be tolerated on the public airwaves. But much worse than Imus on any given day, are Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage — who also have their own shows. They systematically engage in hate-speak and Nationally syndicated Clear Channel radio host Glen Beck has actually sent out screaming death wishes to certain Democrats he hates. He called hurricane survivors in New Orleans "scumbags," and said he "hates" 9-11 families: "I didn't think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims. (More below, but first this...)

Please Go back and listen to Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly's shows. Every single day, they provoke people to hate their fellow man, to hate anyone who is not pro-Bush, pro-war labeling peacemakers as traitors. Every other word out of their mouths conveys their disgust for perceived liberal bias, for human rights groups, environmentalists, liberals, gays, Muslims, women's groups, feminists, "Hollywood" Democracts and their fellow man.

Is this kind of hate-mongering good for America? Is the politics of personal destruction good for America? Does anyone know the truth about the "Swift Boat Veterans" who ruined John Kerry? Did the media ever get the word out that the man behind this campaign was a completely deranged individual who was caught lying and posting threats on blogs -- and had no credibility whatsoever? I will post the truth you missed in my next thread.

On all these political talk shows, every single pundit, except for Keith Olbermann — are raving right wingers. Chris Matthews aside, there are no other intelligent, Progressive or Democrat-leaning talk show pundits with thoughtful, reasoned voices -- such as Paul Waldman or Scott Ritter or Robert Dreyfuss or Arianna Huffington. The list is endless. We have so many wonderfully intelligent people that could be talk show hosts, yet we get these sinister loud-mouths who dumb America down such as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh.. and of course Bill O'Reilly, one of the most hateful hypocrites on the public airwaves. Why are they still on the air? They take glee in stirring up hatred. What a tragedy for America. We need to become a softer, kinder nation. We need to come together and see each other with fresh eyes. We are all one race, and we are all flawed.

BUSH LIED, THOUSANDS DIED and are dying ....WHY?
In case you didn't know the reasons most Americans are so upset with Bush, here is a brilliant article that describes how we feel. This is an an article by Paul Waldman, Senior Fellow at Media Matters and author of "It's Not Enough to Be Right: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success." We had him on our show a few weeks ago. Don't forget, this Saturday morning at 9 AM PST we're honored to have Congressman Charlie Rangle, who has been serving America for over 30 years. He's a great wit, and a man with such a keen eye and big heart. He's on CNN and MSNBC almost every week.

ALL THE RAGE
There's No Denying it, we Progressives are Angry
by Paul Waldman

We can’t deny it any longer. There’s no point in hiding it, no point in trying to explain it away. Yes, it’s true: We progressives are angry. And we no longer care if the centrist, moderate guardians of the establishment scold us for it.

Our anger is not just some vague feeling whose source we can’t put our finger on. It isn’t based on absurd conspiracy theories and it isn’t illogical.

We’re angry because of what has happened to our country, because of how we’ve been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. We’re angry at the president, we’re angry at the Congress, we’re angry at the news media. And we have every right to be.

Yes, we’re angry at George W. Bush. We’re not angry at him because of who he sleeps with, and we’re not angry at him because we think he represents some socio-cultural movement we didn’t like 40 years ago, or because he hung out with a different crowd than we did in high school. We’re angry at him because of what he’s done.

It’s true, we don’t like the fact that the most powerful human being on the planet is such a ridiculous buffoon that he can’t put two coherent sentences together without beginning to giggle and shimmy his shoulders. But we’re not angry because we think he’s stupid, we’re angry because he treats us as though we’re stupid. We’re angry that he lied to us, and lied to us and lied to us again. We’re angry that when he lies to us it isn’t because he’s caught up in scandal or got caught doing something he shouldn’t have, it’s part of a carefully constructed plan to fool the public.

Yes, we’re angry about Iraq, and we may be for the rest of our lives. We get angry every day when we open our newspapers and see the photo of another young soldier who died for this, another one maimed for life, another one with a tormented and broken soul. We’re angry about the couple of trillion dollars this war will cost. We’re angry about the thousands of young men around the world have been driven into the arms of al Qaeda, who have decided to devote their lives to killing Americans because of this war. We’re angry about the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who have died in the orgy of bloodshed we unleashed, and the living too, those whom we said we were coming to “liberate,” but who now find themselves in a suffocating, endless miasma of fear and misery and death.

We’re angry that when we talk about ending this monstrous war, the soulless hypocrites who are glad to send more and more men and women to be scarred and maimed and killed in Iraq have the gall to accuse us of not “supporting the troops.” We’re angry that people whose actions exhibit nothing but contempt for freedom and liberty and justice, who wouldn’t know real patriotism if it came up and smacked them across the face, pin a little flag on their lapel and say that we’re the ones who hate America.

We’re angry because people who said the Iraqis would greet us as liberators, who said Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were good buddies, who said this nightmare of a war would bring a flowering of democracy across the Middle East—this band of idiots, the Kristols and the Krauthammers and the Kagans and the Kondrackes, is treated as “serious” and “credible” on matters of national security, while those of us who were right about the war are dismissed as some sort of fringe whose ideas are too silly to listen to.

We’re angry that America may now be the only country in the world in which torture is an officially sanctioned policy, proclaimed proudly in public. We’re angry that in our name prisoners are subjected to sleep deprivation, water boarding and other forms of psychological torture to the point where they are literally driven mad. We’re angry that the president has decided, over 750 times, that if Congress passes a law and he doesn’t like it, he’ll just ignore it. We’re angry that this administration has argued over and over, in public and in court, that if the president does it, it’s not illegal. We’re angry that they tell us we have to shred our freedoms in order to be safe, and that so many of our fellow citizens shrug their shoulders and think it’s no big deal.

And we’re angry that Bush has made our nation so hated around the world. We’re angry that the next time a Democrat gets elected, most of their time will be spent cleaning up the god-awful mess Bush has made of everything.

We’re angry that we and our children and our grandchildren will have to keep paying off the nation’s debt, which now stands at nearly $9 trillion. We’re angry because every other industrialized country in the world has a single-payer health care system that works, and we pay more for ours than any of them, yet we have 45 million people with no health insurance. We’re angry that the insurance companies have convinced their obedient servants in Congress that the Rube Goldberg perpetual paperwork machine we have now is somehow “the best health care in the world” and preferable to a system in which you go to your doctor, get treated and go home, without having to fill out 10 forms and get down on your knees before the gods of the HMO bureaucracy to get a partial repayment minus your deductible and your co-pay.

We’re angry that the federal government is brimming with people fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agencies over which they preside, the anti-environmentalists who run the Interior department, the mining company lobbyists in charge of mine safety and the union-busters in charge of worker safety. We’re still angry about Hurricane Katrina, that our government left thousands of its citizens stranded to suffer and die, while the president thought that the guy presiding over the disastrous failure was doing a heckuva job. We’re angry that our government sends religious fundamentalists around the world to discourage condom use, thus condemning untold numbers of people to unwanted pregnancy, disease and death.

We’re angry that forty years after the Voting Rights Act, the Republican Party continues to exploit racism and do everything in its power to stop black people from voting in each and every election. We’re angry that in the richest country in the world we can’t seem to find our way to a system in which you go to the polls, cast your ballot and know that it will be counted. And yes, we’re still angry about what happened in Florida in 2000, that through lying and cheating and pure luck the Republicans were able to steal a presidential election, and five unprincipled partisans on the Supreme Court helped them do it. We’re angry that every time we look at Al Gore all that pain and frustration and outrage comes bubbling up through our guts no matter how hard we try to “get over it.”

We’re angry that some of the most powerful people in America see nothing wrong with getting down on their knees to kiss the rings of radical clerics espousing a theology as maniacal as any on earth. We’re angry that we have to endure lecture after lecture on “family values” from people who rush from their pulpits, whether in church or in Congress or on cable chat shows, to a motel room to give in to their desires and revel in their transgression before rushing back to those pulpits to wag a finger in all our faces with talk of sin. We’re angry that people whose souls are so twisted by hate and shame they make John Winthrop look like Wavy Gravy have the nerve to tell us how to live “moral” lives.

We’re angry that when some pompous fool who less than a decade ago demanded that Bill Clinton be impeached in order to demonstrate our fealty to the “rule of law” comes on television to explain how Scooter Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice mean nothing and he must immediately be pardoned, Wolf Blitzer doesn’t say, “Get out of this studio, you contemptible hypocrite, and don’t ever come back.”

We’re angry because a repellent ghoul like Ann Coulter can regularly advocate the murder of people with whom she has political differences, yet continue to get invited on the Today Show. We’re angry that journalists who ought to know better tut-tut progressive bloggers for using dirty words but don’t blink an eye when conservatives spew forth the most abominable hatred and calls for violence that one could imagine.

We’re angry that there is not a single show on cable news in which a progressive is given an hour to spout off his or her opinions, but that privilege is given to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and John Gibson and Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough and all the other two-bit electronic hucksters of phony aggrievement.

We’re angry because snake-oil salesmen like William Donohue— despite being an anti-Semitic homophobe —can issue a press release expressing patently phony outrage about something somebody said, and get the mainstream press to jump like trained dogs. We’re angry because a band of liars like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can hoodwink the media into doing their dirty work for them. We’re angry because every despicable Republican attack gets recycled as knowing, arched-eyebrow commentary by “mainstream” commentators.

Those are a few of the things we’re angry about, and yes, that’s a lot of anger. But you know what? There’s nothing wrong with being angry. Anger is the appropriate reaction to moral outrages, to crimes against our common humanity, to the actions of those who would turn our country into something twisted and ugly.

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, "Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success."
© 2007 TomPaine.com

From Lydia: I struggle with my anger toward Bush and I pray for him to gain wisdom, compassion and to truly understand the Christ Truth. As a mother of young sons, I feel such agony over the deaths of our soldiers — young kids barely out of high school — and I am so horrified at Bush's arrogance, that he doesn't seem to care about human life. I am most upset that Bush proclaims he's a Christian, yet persists in doing the exact opposite of the Great Peacemaker's teachings. The "anti-Christ" means "evil in the mind of man; evil in human thought." I do not believe in a physical "anti-Christ" but Bush and the pro-war politicians, including misguided evangelical leaders such as John Hagee, Tim LaHaye and Pat Robertson represent the anti-Christ thought on earth right now; of this I have no doubt. Research how they are connected to White Supremacists. Jesus himself called the religious leaders, the pharisees a "brood of vipers" and got very angry with them. We are angry with Bush for his wanton destruction of lives and our democracy.

But I know that thinking the worst of Bush, or anyone, never helps them. We have to send love to those who are in the dark, that have lost their way. We need to see the good in people, even those we think are evil, becaues there is no power in evil except that which we give it with our thoughts. This is prayer: seeing the good in others so overwhelmingly that our vision of them actually changes the situation. Even with terrorists, dictators, "deciders" — and in the environment, world affairs, financial crises — it works for our worst enemies. It's written in the New Testament, in red lettering.