This was the most frightening thing that I have ever read.

I am a Born-Again, ant-abortion democrat, living in the south.

I have seen how otherwise good, strong Christians can be made to accept the crimes committed to further the cause of the Christ who would condemn those crimes.

It requires them to abandon the most basic tenents of Christianity in order to fulfill the greater dictates of Christianity, as they see them.

For instance, the murder of abortionists to prevent the murder by abortion becomes a morally acceptable position for them. They see the murder of one being a lesser evil than the murder of a thousand. Since there is no biblical basis for this type of moral algebra, one has to substitute his own notions of right behavior for the ones Jesus laid out for us.

This is the sin of the Pharisees.

When these modern day Pharisees can ignore the explicit teachings of the bible, which is the word of their living God, what force can the U.S. constitution hope to have with them?

And Bush is the new High Priest of these Pharisees.

He has the complete trust of these people because he claims to be doing god's work.

I may be wrong, but I don't recall any biblical figure advancing God's agenda by breaking his commandments.

But as long as Bush is substituted for Jesus in the moral algebra of Pharisees any evil can be perpetrated by this president with impunity.

And the good name of Christ is dragged down by the actions of a foolish man.

And the strength of a great nation is dragged down in the name of the Christ who he claims to serve.

Just advancing such a legal theorum should be grounds for impeachment.

The hilarious Q&A is another example of how far removed Neo-Cons are from reality. Our nation is being run by people who think a complex world can be run like a grade school confrontation!

And at that his analogy was false.

Attacking Iraq after 9/11 was more like hitting a different student after being struck by a bully.

None of the planners or attackers on 9/11 were from Iraq.

You forget to mention one step in the Bush admonistration's manipulations of the media.

1. They leak the (dis)information they want spread.

2. The media spreads it without filter.

3. The administration cites the media reports as proof for their positions.

This has the effect of the administration quoting itself as a confirming source.

The state approved torture by the United States is beyond shameful. It undercuts any claim of moral superiority and puts our own soldiers and citizens at risk.

Bush need not await history's judgement. History has always ajudged torure, invasion and the withdrawl of civil liberties as the acts of despots.

He will be seen as the first American despot. Hopefully, he will be our last.

The Idaho Family Values Association should have to forfeit any non-profit status that it now enjoys.

"The Party, in the wake of the Mark Foley incident in particular, can no longer straddle the fence on the issue of homosexual behavior. Even setting Senator Craig's situation aside, the Party should regard participation in the self-destructive homosexual lifestyle as incompatible with public service on behalf of the GOP."

Such statements identify them for what they are: a branch of the Republican Party masked as a non-partisan advocacy group.

Some hypocrisy is to be expected in human society, but the holier-than-thou family values demagogues deserve anything that the Larry Flints of the world can dig up and publish about them.

I am a Born-Again Christian. And I sure will be glad when a candidate's morality is not a campaign issue.

Since the Republicans have co-opted a Republican Jesus our nation and our Lord have been diminished.

If politicians would spend half as much time trying to improve our nation as the do trying to pander we would all be better off.

Irony.

It seems that the NeoCon motivation behind the warrantless eavesdropping program was fear of the consequences of another attack. (Probably the fear of losing elections more than anything else, but fear nonetheless.) They knew that another terrorist success on our mainland would completely repudiate their claimed superiority in security concerns.

Its rather a shame that they aren't honest enough to see that the extraordinary steps they've taken were never needed. The 9/11 assault took years of planning and had backfired on the perpetrators (the world had united behind America until Bush slapped them in the face).

And worse, we had the intelligence right before the attacks. That the Bush administration ignored the intelligence is a failure of great import. But to attempt to hide that failure by such extralegal over-reactions is a far greater failure.

Had Bush admitted the original failure and taken reasonable steps to insure that future warnings would be taken seriously, we would have a stronger nation.

And Bush would have a legacy he could have been proud of.