The GOP’s Albatross

George W. Bush's job approval rating continues to drop. A CNN poll shows that only 32% of Americans approve of Chokes-On-Pretzel's job performance. Interestingly, 8% of the American population lives under a rock and doesn't know if he's doing a good job or not. (I'm guessing these are the same people responsible for shows like Pimp My Ride and Fear Factor…)

A few reasons for this? Oil prices, gasoline prices, Katrina, veterans, Iraq, Iran – to name a very few. 

He certainly doesn't help his cause by uttering stuff like this:

From Editor and Publisher, via HuffPo:

Bush said he'd sat in a California church on Sunday near a mother and stepfather grieving for their son who had been killed in Iraq. "I also want to let you know that before you commit troops that you must do everything that you can to solve the problem diplomatically," he commented. "And I can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max and would have committed troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq, knowing what I know today."

Or this:

"I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true," he said. "One, I believe there's an Almighty."

Karl Rove is going to really have to work his a$$ off! Smearing and swift-boating the opposition may not be enough when the President is doing such an amazing job of making himself unlikable to everyone who isn't a rabid right-wing religious zealot. A huge part of Rove's job this year will be keeping the Congressional Republicans from jumping ship.

At this point, "rearranging deck chairs" isn't quite the appropriate analogy for the administration. I'm reminded more of the part in Titanic, when the ship rises up on its nose before sliding into the ocean, and – in sheer desperation to avoid being taken down with the ship – people started flinging themselves off the stern.

I wonder which administration official will end up being the guy who hits the propeller on the way down? 

A Christian Nation?

A great many of the Founders of the United States were not Christians, but Deists. They didn't believe in the Christian god, but believed in a God – the God of Nature, God of Enlightenment, God of Reason, etc. They believed some divine force was at work in the universe, and many believed in God and his Son, but not in the trappings of Christianity.

From the literal beginning of our nation, a division between government and religion was made.

From God and the Founders in Newsweek:

America's first fight was over faith. As the Founding Fathers gathered for the inaugural session of the Continental Congress on Tuesday, September 6, 1774, at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia, Thomas Cushing, a lawyer from Boston, moved that the delegates begin with a prayer. Both John Jay of New York and John Rutledge, a rich lawyer-planter from South Carolina, objected.

Their reasoning, John Adams wrote his wife, Abigail, was that "because we were so divided in religious sentiments"-the Congress included Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others -"we could not join in the same act of worship." The objection had the power to set a secular tone in public life at the outset of the American political experience.

[snip]

The Founders, however, resolutely refused to evoke sectarian-specifically Christian-imagery: the God of the Declaration is largely the God of Deism, an Enlightenment-era vision of the divine in which the Lord is a Creator figure who works in the world through providence.

The Founding Fathers rejected an attempt to rewrite the Preamble of the Constitution to say the nation was dependent on God, and from the Lincoln administration forward presidents and Congresses refused to support a "Christian Amendment" that would have acknowledged Jesus to be the "Ruler among the nations."

Thomas Jefferson is the best known example. From his writings, he made it abundantly clear that a person's faith was something private and personal, solely between him and his chosen God. Jefferson, despite all reports to the contrary, believed Christianity was just about the worst thing that could have happened to the teachings of Christ.

He even went so far as to create his own New Testament – literally cutting apart Bibles printed in English, French, Latin and Greek – removing all references to miracles, angels, and supernatural events, re-organizing verses, and leaving what he described as the 'distilled essence' of Christ.

First, the immense arrogance of such a task – to assume he could recognize the 'real' words and events of Christ's life and ministry from the 'chaff', and then re-organizing the New Testament as he saw fit! Does this sound like the act of a devoted Christian? Hardly.

Though he is often cited as an example of a 'Christian' founder, because of his use of the word 'God' in his many writings, the truth is that Jefferson didn't subscribe to Christian orthodoxy – in fact, he said that religious leaders of his time worried about his becoming President, and he understood their fear as he had 'sworn eternal hostility' to any form of tyranny over men's minds.

Jefferson himself equated religous leaders with tyrants because they required blind loyalty and subservience at the expense of rational thinking. And Jefferson prized rational thinking and scientific process above all else.

Through Jefferson's numerous letters and essays, we get a much clearer picture of the man and his belief system. In a letter, he once said that he was no member of any organized religion, and believed he was the only member of his particular faith.

Here are a couple sites with more in-depth information: Early America Review and an essay by Stephen Morris from 1995.