I was going to write about how war dehumanizes the warriors as well as the victims. We’ve seen it with the photos of Abu Ghraib, the massacre at Haditha, the treatment of the Guantanamo suicides as a “publicity stunt” and now the idiotic video of a Marine singing “Hadji girl” about murdering an Iraqi family for fun.

So while I started to write this I went searching for quotes from Frederick Douglass about how slavery dehumanized white slave owners as well as slaves. I got sucked into reading A Narrative on the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass. And now I would rather read that than write something that is going to break my heart and disgust me about man’s inhumanity to man. I know, I’m just going to read about it instead of writing about. But Frederick Douglass gives me hope. He had every reason to hate. Instead he fought injustice where ever he saw it, against blacks, against women, even against Catholics in Ireland.
I’m going to read this and see if I can arm myself with whatever it was Douglass used to keep himself from dehumanizing other people.

No, I’m not dead, nor can I reach into the nether realms and blog from there (a new blog in the making, I’m sure). No,I’m talking about those other humans, Republicans.
Here is what they think it will take to stay in control of Congress (from the Washington Post).

Okay, nothing earth shattering, but it adds information to our regular discussion about the upcoming election and returns us again to the role of the centrist voter. Please form your opinion. (Omigod, think for myself. Isnt’ there someone on television who can do that for me?!).

Or at least ones who were blessed with non-wrinkly skin. I look exactly like Wonder’s mom, my aunt. So I have a good idea what I’ll look like 20 years from now and the news is good on both the wrinkle and the smoking front (she’s got amazing wrinkle free skin and every time I see her I think ‘damn I got the good genes’):

Middle-aged smokers with heavily lined faces have a five times higher risk of lung disease than their un-wrinkled peers, a study has suggested.

After age and the number of years someone had smoked were taken into account, smokers with lined faces were five times more likely to have COPD.

Facial wrinkling was also associated with triple the risk of more severe emphysema.

from the LA Times

Parkinson became the third Republican politician in the last nine months to startle this red state by switching to the minority party. The other two are targeting GOP incumbents in the attorney general’s office and in the state House of Representatives.

Anyone think this might be the work of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

June 13,2006 | WASHINGTON — In a surprise move, a House panel voted Tuesday for a hike in the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25, which would be the first increase in a decade.

First in a decade. Do you all remember how hard it was to get the last minimum wage hike passed? I don’t either- it was a fuck of a long time though.

So at least they are getting the issue going in the House, but it will be stripped faster than Jeff Gannon on a porn site.

Happy mid-term election year- let’s see how many more doomed to fail populist proposals get brought up and squashed.

What kind of justice do people who sell arms to embargoed places deserve? A lot less than they actually get says this article.

Last Christmas I had an argument with a right wing, conservative, white, male veteran who was bemoaning that “no one represents people like me anymore, that’s the problem with affirmative action” to which I responded ” I think people like you have control of the House, the Senate, and the White House. What more representation do you need?”

Today there is an article in the NY Times called The Ascent of a Woman about the possibility of having a female president in the United States. The news doesn’t look good and it sums up a few things that any feminist poly sci student could tell you.

1) A lot of female leaders in other countries are part of a dynasty. Their family’s recognition helps voters get past the whole voting for a woman thing. Examples include Indira Gandhi and Corazon Aquino and Benazir Bhutto.

2) While we think that a female leader would be more liberal, the ones that actually get elected are considered unusually tough. Angela Merkel’s father was part of the East German Stazi and Michelle Bachelet of Chile was Defense Minister. Hillary Clinton’s pro-war stance may be an effort to prove she can be just as hawkish as the boys .

3) It is so much easier to get elected in a parliamentary system than a presidential one because it is the entire party that gets voted into office and then the party picks a leader. Once your party is in power passing legislation is a piece of cake compared to the American system.

4) A good pool of women with political experience just doesn’t exist in this country. We are still massively under-represented in the House, Senate and Governors offices.

So Hillary may have some of these credentials- she is a Clinton and she is tough and she is a Senator who has White House experience (as First Lady) But her own party (me included) isn’t really fond of her. Her run to the center appears much more like political pandering than her husband’s centrist acts.

I’m sitting here trying to think of a female politician who I could vote for. My own two senators are out, Patty Murray is kinda inept and Maria Cantwell is also pro-war. Nancy Pelosi did the whole chicken-shit we won’t impeach thing. Madeline Albright is tough and funny, she certainly has the international chops. But she can’t run because she was born outside the US and there is that atrocious quote about the Iraq sanctions (that caused mass starvation in Iraq way before the war resulting in 500,000 Iraqi children dying) “Better 500,000 Iraqis than one American” or something to that effect.

Are there any female politicians you guys would be willing to vote into the White House? And why?

In a recent post last week, I started a line of thought about beliefs and political ideals, noting that I have long believed God planned humanity to have a diversity of views. I didn’t think I would ever finish it, thinking nobody would care, but the topic seems to have stimulated discussion, so I’ll plug along.

I’m having second thoughts about my beliefs based on the idea that there might not be any grand theme in the Bible, and if there is, it is wrong. Not just that the Bible is not inspired in the infallible sense that fundamentalists use it to justify clinging to ancient superstitions, or that there is some great mysterious truth behind the myths, as liberals like to say — just that it is a book created by well-meaning people trying to understand a confusing world.

I don’t want to bog down a blog billed as “cool” with theology, but it is clear reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) that a main theme is that God favored the Israelite people and planned to install them — led by a prophet with the office of Messiah (Christ) — as rulers of the earth. I imagine that thought would have comforted a people used to being attacked and forced into subservience by powerful empires.

Christianity teaches that the entire Bible was inspired, but it also teaches that the Jews were wrong because A) the Messiah is God and not a human and B) the real Kingdom is in “heaven” and not a political kingdom on earth. The problem is that the evidence inidicates that Jesus and his disciples clearly believed the Jewish ideas. Christian beliefs to the contrary can only be found by picking out odd verses from different books.

Taking the New Testament books as a whole, it is clear that Jesus and his disciples believed that they were going to be involved in the glorious return of God in their lifetime. In the beginning of the book of Acts, the resurrected Jesus teaches for 40 days about the coming kingdom, and the disciples only recorded question is “when?”

Peter said in his first book “the end is near” and Paul gave people practical tips for an ancient version of Y2K. In the books they wrote just before they died, they changed their tune. For example, in his second book, Peter said to ignore those who scoffed at the idea of the end of the world, even though such talk had been wrong. His famous explanation was that “a day with the Lord is like a thousand years,” evidence that spin is not a modern invention!

So does the Bible have any meaning today in political discourse? For all their faults, I believe fundamentalists do have a point — if the Bible is not inspired, it is just another book produced by a bunch of Middle Easterners who reflected the culture of a primitive time. I can’t agree with their ability to explain away — or ignore — the mixture of slavery, polygamy, blood sacrifice, genocide, the death penalty for a wide variety of offenses such as homosexuality, oddball dietary laws and worship rituals. However, the fundamentalist view makes just as much sense as that of liberal Christians, who speak of a mystic truth behind what they see as well-written fables, but fables nonetheless.

This post is philosophical and not political — that’s a topic for another day. Obviously, the history I provide here is very sketchy and my conclusion is thinking out loud. But maybe our task is to try and do justice and what is right for people and this planet without having to justify its adherence to the Bible.