One thing that I find striking about Blumenthal’s indictment of Bush is that for any one of the examples he sights of incompetence, corruption, profligacy and willful, smug ignorance, one could easily substitute several others, his disastrous one size fits all education policy, the missile defense boondoggle, the Medicare boondoggle etc. The enormity and scope of this administration’s behavior, its failure on every front is so grand and the ramification for the future so profound that the mind reels before it. Still Blumenthal is right in this, you get the government you deserve… maybe you and I don’t but the American people do, millions upon millions of Americans voted for this man not once but twice and it is around their necks this albatross of a presidency should be tied.

These days my conservative friends are scurrying to get out from under this disaster… “Bush isn’t a real conservative”, “who could have known”, or my favorite… “Gore or Kerry would have been just as bad or worse”. Soon they’ll be trotting out the “stab in the back”, it may be a few years, but when the next attack happens or after the next president fails at cleaning up this or that mess left behind by Bush 43, we’ll hear it coming from the right… “If only the liberal appeasers hadn’t hamstrung Bush back in the day, the fifth column, the media, if only they hadn’t stopped him from doing the right things then all this could have been avoided.” The whole thing makes me sick. What a waste of a great nation, what a terrible waste.

I’ll let others argue about the denigration of women and the Book of Revelations and letting adults make their own choices. Pastor Driscoll and his congregants seem to be decent fellows who may have a world view I don’t share but otherwise aren’t hurting anyone, at least no more than the Amish or the Hasidim. I’m sure that for many people the experience of Mars Hill is a deeply gratifying one that fills a spiritual and communal need that often goes unaddressed in the modern American consumer society. If they can find a way to be happy with their Jesus and get nose rings and drink beer, more power to them. But to use Mr. Deitz’a phrase, “this is as far as it goes”. They can be conversant in pop culture and get tattoos and believe that ever single word in the Bible is literally true and hell they can breed like rats as well, that’s their business. But here’s where my ears pricked up.

“The way Driscoll sees it, the more babies his conservative Christian congregation can produce in this child-poor city, the more they can redirect local politics, public education, and culture in one of the liberal capitals of the world.”

This is all well and good until they start wanting to change the laws and the textbooks in the schools to reflect their religion, and all of a sudden it does matter what’s on my IPod, because they want to censor it. I have no problem with people of deeply held faith retreating from my secular world; I get nervous when they want to start fixing things.

I’ve never bought into the idea that Rove is some kind of political “genius”. 9/11 saved Rove in the same way it saved his master. Bush was on his way to being a failed one term president, appointed to office after a controversial election. 9/11 obviously changed that and Bush and Rove benefited from it. So far Rove has profited by other’s mistakes, the luck of disaster and the cooperation of a main stream media that was happy to fixate on Gore’s missteps and Kerry’s hair while wrinkling its collective nose at any hint of trouble in Bush’s corner. Sure Rove took an intellectual nonentity and made him president, but that has to be weighed against that cipher’s last name and the fact that he was a sitting governor of a large state, with a fairly short political history that had already been thoroughly rinsed clean. The fact that Rove had a candidate two years before the 2004 election with approval ratings in the mid 90s and still managed to eek out a win under dubious circumstances and only after deploying gay baiting and the swift boaters, shouldn’t add much luster to his reputation. Sadly I think the GOP will retain control of both houses of Congress this fall, if barely and Rove will be the “genius” again, but I think it will have been Tom Delay and his jiggering of the Texas Congressional districts rather than some master strategy from turd blossom that allows Bush to leave office in 2008 on his own terms. More’s the pitty.

I'm not much for internet boycotts and I'm not that big of a John Lennon fan, but there is a sense in which I can see feeling uncomfortable with this film about his assassin, not on any cinematic grounds but in general. As I understand it, a large part of Chapman’s motivation in killing the ex-Beatle was his stated desire to be famous. A film, even a very good film that grants this pathetic little killer his wish, troubles me. I'm most definitely not questioning whether the film should have been made or seen, I'm just saying it troubles me.