Noelfitz rightly quotes the beginning of chapter 13 of Romans about obedience to human authorities as obedience to God Who establishes them. It is that the office (and civilization) deserves the respectful obedience if the man (or woman) has less than inspiring character. Don’t you wonder, too, though, if you can ask God ‘what have You got us stepping into now?’ As if following Jesus down a path just used by an extended camel caravan?
Every ‘expert’ out there has advice for the debates of the Presidential candidates. After this overly extended campaign, my advice would be: “Resign your candidacies, and let’s start over again.” Of course, with the total line of candidates we have seen, they would all need to resign and let some fresh blood and faces in.
I have noted that George Bush had more in common with Al Gore than with any of us – that this holds true among all political animals. Replace G.B. with B.O., and A.G. with J.M., and the statement holds.
Even so, in my memory, I can recall no prior election in which “selecting the lesser of two evils” seemed to apply so actually. The fact of the matter is that I (and some others I have talked to) find both candidates rather clueless for principled leadership; this, even setting aside Christian principles. I have less and less doubt that the U.S.A. is generally in for four awful years, what with the less-than-one-in-ten satisfaction with which we hold Congress. Come to think of it, the upshot just may include our ‘leaders’ doing everything to ‘set aside Christian principles’.
One goof is all for cutting spending even as he is better known for combating cutting taxes. The other will increase spending – by GOBS! – while giving “95%” of taxpayers a tax cut – this, even though 35-40% don’t even pay taxes at the moment, anyway.
One, admirer as he is of Mother Teresa holds little else of Christian principle. The other, our Congressional pro-child-murder poster boy, I question whether he has a Christian bone in him, with a half-brother living in Africa on a dollar a month! No, he’s not a Muslim – that frankly just could be an improvement on what he may be.
One may have his own personal ‘maverick’ political machine but he sure seems a kind of bad mechanistic joke, at that. The other is right out of the longest running corrupt political machine since Lenin-Stalin – Daley-esque Chicago-Cook County, from which I harken.
Both claim ‘bi-partisanship’ nearly transcendent of the partisan. However, for me, from experience, ‘bi-partisan’ means a possible conspiracy between the crookedly cynical and the nearly patentably feather-brained – and, both camps, fools, treating citizens like fools. Too very frequently, ‘bi-partisanship’ seems to mean ‘just send your bank account books to us and ignore what we do with the money’.
I would feel more comfortable if it seemed that all (or, at least 90% of) 435 Representatives and 33 Senators were about to be dumped for new folks, faces, ideas, etc. But, the sun will rise in the west before incumbents cease maneuvering to claim a spider’s worth of legs-up.
I confess that like the late Mike Royko, by far Chicago’s best pundit, I love mud-slinging between candidates – the better to get glimpses of both/all that we need toward making our decision. Politics, as the saying goes, ain’t bean-bag.
I just worry that we haven’t got time enough to get all the mud (camel doo-doo?) slung.
And, when they try to establish ‘who won the debate’, I get this feeling that the truest answer is ‘NOT US!’
