WASHINGTON (C.U.News)  Proving that he was a maverick all along, President McCain, on the anniversary of his first week in office, has ordered the re-invasion of Iraq.

“The agreement reached by the previous US president and the current Iraqi prime minister to pull US troops out of Iraq on a timetable is not in the best interests of the country,” stated McCain’s press secretary William Kristol. “Therefore, the president has issued an executive order repealing Bush’s SOFA agreement with the Iraqi government. Additionally, he has ordered the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare an immediate regime change plan aimed at deposing Prime Minister Maliki and his Iranian quisling enablers.”

Asked about this radical departure from his predecessor’s actions, Kristol smirked: “I guess we can finally lay to rest all that pre-election blather about a third Bush term. Having suffered through decades of the post-Vietnam syndrome that so weakened America’s resolve to execute its manifest destiny, President McCain has today launched a pre-emptive attack on post-Iraq syndrome. By insuring we stay there forever, he is guaranteeing victory with honor for the American people.”

Attempts to reach former president George W. Bush for comment has been unsuccessful. Reports that he was arrested by Interpol agents and flown to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes remain unconfirmed.

A number of significant economic statistics were announced yesterday: inflation hit a 71/2 year high; consumer earning power declined 3 1/2% from last year; and home foreclosures rose 55%.

Fueling these economic fires has been the soaring cost of the Iraq war and occupation.

Using credit cards, American taxpayers bought huge amounts of stock in Corporate America’s colonization of Iraq. After 5/12 years, the stock has depreciated dramatically, the cards’ principal, interest, and penalties have been reset to infinity, and margin calls are expected shortly.

Analysts following the company say the stock’s collapse is due to a number of factors: deterioration of good will in the American brand; soaring energy and consumer prices; the devaluation of the American dollar and the attendant difficulties of securing future financing; and, looming down the road, the forced sell-off of private and national American assets.

It’s like watching an economic train wreck in slow motion. But there is a silver lining. Given the huge toll that Iraq and Afghanistan has had on the Pentagon’s military readiness and the attendant deterioration of the American dollar, there’s simply insufficient political, military or financial or resources available to support the necons’ future imperial expansion plans. (Said with fingers crossed.)

The karma principle of causality continuity is…very close to the truth of the repercussional synthesis of all time-space actions in the Deity presence of the Supreme. -The Urantia Book

At a press conference today meant to display John McSame’s superior foreign policy credentials, the Rethuglicans‘ reality challenged presidential candidate either had a senior moment, or he believes that the corporatist media is so in the tank for him that he is free to utter even the most egregious hypocritical pronouncements and escape scrutiny.

Case in point: the roiling Russia-Georgia war. Scolds the morally correct McSame:

“[I]n the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

Excuse me? Has our corporatist media sainted war hero forgotten Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of both he so throatily encouraged?

Consider also his previous pronouncement on Georgia that an editor from Wikipedia pointed out contains copious amounts of plagiarized material from the Wiki site.

Guess we know now how McSame would answer that iconic 3:00 AM phone call— frantically try to get online to access Wikipedia.

McSame improvises as an EMF burst fries D.C.’s com circuits

The response from the Obama campaign is obvious— adopt the Rovian tactic of attacking an opponent’ perceived strength. The operative word here is, of course, perceived. As this and other numerous McSame foreign policy gaffes proves, McSame’s alleged expertise is a fiction to begin with.

Should be an Obama PR slam dunk.

McSame’s Mock Obama Strategy Under the direction of John McSame’s new Rovian campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, the attacks against Obama’s character have become so vituperative that even long-time McSame supporters like Mike Murphy and Mike Weaver are crying foul, (or at least, lame). Not only because they are damaging his brand as someone who eschews personal attacks, but because he is now telling outright lies about his opponent’s actions, like not visiting wounded troops in Iraq without camera (per NBC’s Andrea Mitchell) and policy positions like income taxes (saying Obama plans to increase taxes of people earning over $42k) and oil drilling.

While these new tactics reek of desperation, and are thus accepted by some Obama supporters as good news, there’s a method to Schmidt’s madness that reveals a far darker and more sophisticated propaganda effort at work.

In conjunction with their attempt to define Obama as an exotic elitist, out of touch with less privileged Americans, Schmidt and his cohorts are busily creating a strawman upon which to train the anger of the electorate instead of the slime who’ve spent the last eight years undermining their economic security.

I’ll be writing more soon on the psychological dynamics involved, in my review of Dr. Bryant Welch’s new book State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind. Suffice it to say that Dr. Welch (interviewed on Ian Master’s show yesterday) predicts that Obama has two weeks to mount a full-fledged counter-attack before this characterization-transference dynamic becomes irreparably hooked into the lizard brains of the average American voter.

He might start with pointing out that his wife Michelle isn’t a wealthy heiress with a Gulfstream 4 ready at a moment’s notice to fly them to any one of their eight fifteen posh residences to host another press baiting Bar-B-Q.

Wrecking the Economy The New York Times leads today with an editorial titled The Darker Outlook at Fannie and Freddie. Noting that “the companies reported even worse-than-expected quarterly results and more pain to come,” and that “shareholder value has been destroyed” (hear that, pension planners?), the two GSEs have become the poster children of the Bush Administration’s economic philosophy of unregulated corporate greed.

Notwithstanding the moral hazard of using taxpayer dollars to bail out “too big to fail” financial institutions (including most recently, Bear Sterns), looks like that’s what’s going to happen. Heck, what’s another few trillion dollars of US debt to dump on the backs of our children’s children’s children.

Once again our current generation of plutocrat robber barons have succeeded in privatizing their profits and socializing their losses. Who says the government is broken, anyway? Works for them.

The Surge Is Not A Success Crooks and Liars reports that:

A Guardian journalist returns home to Iraq to find that far from what we hear in the US, the surge has produced nothing approaching normalcy or peace, but rather ghettos seething with violence, with nothing but makeshift walls dividing the increasingly hostile warring factions.

[Read more →]

                 Urban renewal project in beautiful downtown Baghdad

Chris Matthews‘ substitute host, McCain enthusiast Mike Barnicle, reacted incredulously Wednesday to a comment by Iraq war vet Jon Soltz, co-founder and chairman of VoteVets.org, that the so-called “surge” has not been a success. Pressed by Barnicle, who refelcts the corporatist media’s official narrative of the surge, Soltz made a number of arguments:

America is less secure as a result of our invasion of Iraq, the surge being just the latest chapter in a failed war and occupation.

Al Qaeda, identified by many including the Obama campaign as America’s top national security threat, is more powerful than any time since 9/11, having reconstituted itself in the Afghan-Pakistan hinterlands. (Lest we forget, AQ didn’t even exist in Iraq before the invasion.)

The US military, tied up on two war fronts, is overstretched and at the breaking point.

The ostensible goal of the surge, Iraqi political reconciliation, is nowhere near a reality, especially in the Kurdish regions.

An overall oil law and revenue sharing law still hasn’t been passed, highlighted by the intensifying ethnic fighting over oil-rich Kirkuk.

Soltz concludes that the problem isn’t overall troop levels but “regional strategic diplomacy”, one of those nuanced Obama concepts that escapes our corporatist media’s obsession with dumbed down narratives for the infantilized American voter. (For which we can thank an educational system that substitutes  dubious testing paradigms for critical thinking skills.)

Additionally, there are a number of other arguments that Soltz didn’t (presumably have time to) make.

Iran has been dramatically strengthened rather than weakened as the region’s presumptive hegemon.

The Turkish military has intensified its incursions into Iraqi sovereign territory.

Regional elections have once again been delayed.

A national oil law has not been signed.

There’s the huge problem of what to do about the 4 million Iraqis that have been forced from their homes, including the vast majority of the educated classes vital to rebuilding the country.

The decision by the political and military wings of Baghdad’s Shia (Mahdi) militias to lay low. Surprising what a couple of hundred high explosive missiles and bombs can accomplish when targeted at your military and civilian base.

The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, courtesy of US financed death squads, for which former Iraq Ambassador John Negroponte of El Salvadoran death squads fame probably deserves some credit. That and the installation of 12 ‘ concrete blast walls has turned the city into a fortified warren of sectarian enclaves.

The decision by the Sunnis, made many months before the surge was even announced, to vanquish foreign fighters from their midst, the so-called Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Comes a time when the “enemies of my enemies” strategy becomes more a liability than an asset. Especially when our mutual enemy offers to put you on the dole of the American taxpayer, a perverse permutation of what we call in my neck of the woods– protection money.

Analogy wise, I live in Los Angeles where we have as many heavily armed gang members as the US has troops in Iraq. [Read more →]

Impact of two terms of Bush’s management of the US Economy

The Bush Administration today issued a mind boggling record deficit projection of $482 billion for 2009. And that’s not even counting the off-budget estimated $80 billion being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the cost of the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and homeowner bailout bill.

That’s a yearly deficit of over one-half trillion dollars, most of it borrowed from strategic competitors like China and Kuwait.

Skyrocketing energy costs are only beginning to ripple through the economy, showing up as higher prices in everything from food to tires to pharmaceuticals.

Home foreclosures are up a staggering 250% (in LA), unemployment is rising rapidly, and even successful businesses with great credit history can’t get a loan.

The entire financial system, ranging from Wall Street, investment houses, to regional banks is in a deep freeze driven by the fact that no one knows what anyone’s paper assets are worth. The economy is so bad that Bush has been forced to betray his conservative base by doing an about-face (legacy pun intended) on the aforementioned bailout. Ayn Rand must be rolling over in her capitalist grave.

Obviously, this is bad news for all Republicans running for office this year. Despite the tragedy of Iraq and the increasing threat of a reconstituted Al Qaeda and resurgent Taliban in Afganistan and Pakistan, we’re back to “It’s the economy, stupid” as the overriding political issue of the 2008 election. And it’s hitting the McSame Campaign like a Democratic mule kick to the gut.

McSame has admitted that the economy is not his strong suit, and that he’s trying to make up it for it by reading the book by the man who did as much as anyone to create the current crisis, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Kinda like asking a surgeon with a history of amputating the wrong limbs to take a little off the top.

McSame’s answer to the ruinous cost of energy— his flip-flop on off-shore drilling, is a classic case of bad timing, considering that oil billionaire (and Swift Boat funder) T-Boone Pickens is currently spending $58 million on an advertising campaign that states that we can’t drill our way out of the crisis.

Oh well, McSame can still run as Commander-in-Chief of the “surge.”

As for his snuggling buddy, George Junior, the latter can sleep easy knowing that once again he has bested his father, the previous deficit champ. By racking up the three largest deficits in US history, W. wins the gold, silver and bronze medals. Now it’s on to the Beijing Olympics, where he has volunteered to judge the synchronized waterboarding competition.

UPDATES

July 29 (Bloomberg) Merrill Lynch, the third-biggest U.S. securities firm, will sell $8.5 billion of stock and liquidate $30.6 billion of bonds at a fifth of their face value to shore up credit ratings imperiled by mortgage losses.

July 29 (Reuters ) Home Prices Fall in May, Erasing Four Years of Gains. ...S&P said the composite index of 10 metropolitan areas fell 1 percent in May, for a 16.9 percent year-over-year drop. Regions that saw some of the largest gains during the housing boom, such as Miami and Las Vegas, were the worst performing markets in May. Miami home prices fell 3.6 percent in May from April for a 28.3 percent annual drop. In Las Vegas, prices in May slumped 2.9 percent, for a 28.4 percent decline from a year earlier.

Photo of McSame’s Botched Nip/Tuck & Hormone Treatment Said to Resemble Trash Media’s Bat Boy

ABOARD THE DOUBLE TALK EXPRESS  (C.U. News) — In an effort to close the perceived and actual age gap between himself and his much younger rival for the presidency, presumptive Republican candidate John McSame has apparently taken the advice of his surgically and chemically-enhanced wife to do some enhancement of his own appearance.

But in this photo, allegedly leaked by a horrified member of McCain’s inner circle and sold at a handsome profit to Weakly Whurled NEWS, the operation and hormone treatments have gone terribly wrong. Luckily for his campaign, a full head and face mold was taken before the alterations, and a latex mask fabricated that preserved his prior appearance.

“It’s a temporary fix,” explained a campaign aide, who insisted on anonymity. “We’re worried that as the heat of summer increases, the mask will start to sag and deteriorate. We’re also worried about how it will hold up indoors under the klieg lights during the debates.”

McSame, who’s on record saying that he’s a twentieth century kind of guy, is wrestling with whether to ascribe his 64+ changes in position to shameless pandering, poor flip flopping impulse control, the after effects of five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam— anything but symptoms of advancing senility.

“If we can just push John Sidney over the finish line in November, we’ll be in the clear. After that, we’ll have all the power of the White House at our disposal. Look how well Reagan’s people disguised his Alzheimer’s during his second term,” said the aide hopefully.

Asked whether voters deserved to know the truth about McSame’s current condition, he replied:

“Look, the American people have experienced enough traumas during eight years of the Dick-Bush Administration. Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11, the tanking economy, the extreme weather effects of global warming— they can only take so much.

“There’s just some change not worth believing in.”

A Charge To Keep, by W.H.D. Koerner

The above painting was proudly displayed in Governor George Bush’s office in Austin, Texas. As Crooks and Liars describes it:

In 1995, he issued a memo to his Texas staff, describing the painting, by W.H.D. Koerner in 1916, which he kept on his office wall. Bush told his aides:

The…painting is based upon the Charles Wesley hymn “A Charge to Keep I Have.” I am particularly impressed by the second verse of this hymn. The second verse goes like this: “To serve the present age, my calling to fulfill; O may it all my powers engage to do my Master’s will.”

This is our mission. This verse captures our spirit. […]

When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.

When one looks at the painting, you see a man on horseback — who actually looks a little like Bush — apparently leading a group of missionaries. It worked for Bush on a couple of levels: the title comes from one of the president’s favorite Methodist hymns, the man in the picture looks like him, and he related to the missionary work depicted in the painting.

He liked all of this so much, Bush used the title for his autobiography (which he admittedly did not write). He even brought the picture with him to Washington upon taking office.

The funny part is the truth about the painting: “Bush’s inspiring, proselytizing Methodist is in fact a silver-tongued horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob.”

Hard to think of a better metaphor for Thursday’s announcement that Bush has set forth an “aspirational goal,” part of “a general time horizon” for withdrawing US forces from Iraq. An event that John McSame likes to call “surrender.”

Not only did Bush pull the rug from beneath McSame’s feet, but Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki proceeded to roll him up inside it by telling the German magazine Der Spiegel that Obama’s plan for withdrawal of US troops for Iraq is just hunky dory with him:

“US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Oh dear, how cold it must be for Saint John to be dangling there alone, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind…

“A Head of Our Times” —Terry Kruger

Yesterday, Barack Obama appeared with Indiana Senator (and veep prospect) Birch Bayh at a forum at Purdue University where he continued to articulate his national security vision. As The Indiana Star reported it:

… Obama argued that the Bush administration has not stayed “one step ahead of the threats of the 21st century.”

Naturally, this line caught my attention as it reflects the second line in my “About” Bio here at US:

“My first editorial column (mid ’70s) was called ‘Staying One Step Ahead of the Future,’ a mantram which I try to follow to this day.”

I’m by no means a big Bible reader, but I was probably influenced by the line in Proverbs 29:18 (perhaps Barack was too):

Where there is no vision, the people perish. . .

Not that vision, or at least the claim to one, is always a good thing. As Bob Woodward writes in “Bush at War”:

[T]he president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master plan.

This is the same Bush who told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that God had told him to strike down Saddam. And we all know how that turned out. So in discussing vision in a political context it is imperative to distinguish between process and content, between means and ends. George Bush Senior admitted he wasn’t particularly good at “the vision thing,” but at least he had enough foresight not to invade Iraq when he had the opportunity.

As for oedipally challenged Junior, he too was likely influenced by the Proverb, but decided that the phrase immediately following “the people perish— ” “but he that keepeth the law, happy is he” wasn’t to his liking.

Launching a preventive war, which the Nuremberg Tribunal designated as the supreme war crime, violated the very international laws that the US did so much to champion in the ruinous wake of World War II.

As for a ‘vision’ of what awaits George and his cohorts after they leave office, I refer the reader to former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s new book The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.” And this quote from H.G. Wells:

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be. . . surer of the noose than a private homicide.

Findings of the US Climate Change Science Program

While the vast amount of media coverage of Obama’s speech on national security today will focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, I would note what Obama himself says is the greatest single security threat to the US (and the world):

This immediate danger is eclipsed only by the long-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next fifty years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the last fifty: Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Most disastrously, that could mean destructive storms on our shores, and the disappearance of our coastline.

This is not just an economic issue or an environmental concern - this is a national security crisis. For the sake of our security - and for every American family that is paying the price at the pump - we must end this dependence on foreign oil. And as President, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Small steps and political gimmickry just won’t do. I’ll invest $150 billion over the next ten years to put America on the path to true energy security. This fund will fast track investments in a new green energy business sector that will end our addiction to oil and create up to 5 million jobs over the next two decades, and help secure the future of our country and our planet. We’ll invest in research and development of every form of alternative energy - solar, wind, and biofuels, as well as technologies that can make coal clean and nuclear power safe. And from the moment I take office, I will let it be known that the United States of America is ready to lead again.

Never again will we sit on the sidelines, or stand in the way of global action to tackle this global challenge.

Over four years ago, the Guardian leaked an internal report, ordered by THE senior Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall, aka “Yoda,” that made this very point. Money quote:

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

Better late than never, I suppose….

McCain climbs Mount Flipflopapalooza (click it)

Johnnie Sidney McCain made his now famous infamous semi-annual monthly weekly pilgrimage to the pungent lava fields of Mount Flipflopapalooza today, and, donning the elaborate headgear of the soulless political automatons of the American archipelago, delivered the latest in an amazing eruption of ratfurker reversals, or in MSM public parlance, “flip flops.”

The undeniable conclusion a sane person arrives at? Teh only way you could flop around like this on the “transcendent issues of our time” is if your spine had been completely vaporized by. . . personal freewill choice. . . or you’re a living marionette controlled by the RNC.

Deep bow to the tireless Steve Benen @ The Carpetbagger Report, for tracking through this extraordinary pile of a politician’s effluvium, which will soon require EPA supervision and environmental impact statements, and for the many supporting story links as well.

Read’m and weep.

1. McCain thought Bush’s warrantless wiretap program circumvented the law; now he believes the opposite.

2. McCain insisted that everyone, even “terrible killers,” “the worst kind of scum of humanity,” and detainees at Guantanamo Bay, “deserve to have some adjudication of their cases,” even if that means “releasing some of them.” McCain now believes the opposite.

3. He opposed indefinite detention of terrorist suspects. When the Supreme Court reached the same conclusion, he called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

4. In February, McCain reversed course on prohibiting waterboarding.

5. McCain favored closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay before he was against it.

6. When Barack Obama talked about going after terrorists in Pakistani mountains with Predators, McCain criticized him for it. He’s since come to the opposite conclusion.

[Read more →]

He may as well be a brother from another planet:
“Greetings; Take me as I am— not as you think I should be.”

The “new politics” of Barack Obama are leaving many Americans lost in his dust. Traditionally they may have been categorized— and understood themselves to be— “liberals,” “conservatives,” “progressives,” “Republicans,” “Democrats,” and “Independents.” Not so surprisingly, a sizable majority of MSM pundits also have no idea what Obama means by a “new politics.”

But it is proving altogether unsettling for these various sub-groups of the electorate, having been so thoroughly and completely indoctrinated in the “Left-Right-Centrist” Meme of politics as usual that they can’t see themselves defined any other way, to suddenly find Barack Obama is not following their calcified notions of what they think he should be, and how he should behave. A few weeks ago Karl Rove was all by his lonesome calling Obama “arrogant” and “elitist” (read: “uppity”); now the fickle mouth breathers of teh illiterate electorate are having to change their intellectual underwear almost every week, and they don’t like it one bit.

Yo Yo: What ever your old political notion was of Barack Obama, he is not definable that way, anymore.

It has nothing to do with the dissection of political decision making by attributing it to left, right, or center, and it never did. These crude demarcations of political ideology never really yielded a true picture of the real values that form the basis of the decisions of a Barack Obama, or any other politician. Obama’s recent decisions have the various segments of his supporters, and his opponents, attempting to hammer them into the increasingly meaningless meme of the old politics, by whining “He’s tacking teh the center,” “He’s betraying the left,” “He can’t be trusted,”  “He won’t go to Bagdad,” He’s just another liar,” “He’s a fundamentalist Christian!” blah, blah, blah— Because the MSM, and even some of the progressive blogosphere, still insist on seeing the political world through the grossly cynical but fading paradigm of the old politics. Thank you, Dick Bush; your legacy is upon us.

It is inevitable that a presidential candidate who actually has a living relationship with Christ will eventually make his way to the White House. The tacit and superficial toleration of the inconsequential religious lives of recent presidential candidates and presidents (save perhaps Jimmy Carter) is symptomatic of an even bigger problem, and it has left the electorate unprepared — even the secular and religiously educated intelligentsia— for what they might expect from an Obama presidency.

Many who were initially inspired by Obama’s leadership abilities and personal charisma haven’t really grokked what he’s been saying about his religious convictions, in his books or in his speeches. Those who have been paying attention, if they are agnostic secularists or even religious secularists, are flabbergasted and confused by his commitment to following the truth— as he sees it, not them or more specifically, their political creed— wherever it may take him. Why is anyone shocked they barely hesitate to turn and rend him, his pearls be damned.

There are numerous comments at places like Alternet and HufPo where one can read the whining superficial loyalty to Obama, now that he’s beginning to “refine” his opinions in ways that don’t nuzzle up to the secular left’s butt cheeks. A couple examples.

Liz Sidoti:

Obama also may be undercutting his claim to be a straight-shooting, new-politics candidate as he repeatedly breaks with his liberal base on various issues to aggressively move to appeal to the center of the electorate.

Liz can’t help but fall into the “center of the electorate” pit; it’s just too easy to assume Obama’s principles are as jello-like as any other politician’s; he can’t really believe his own decisions are based on real principles, can he??

I selected this comment from Susan of Texas at HufPo because she riffs on a “true believers” stereotype and father substitution, while throwing in a little personal peccadillo she harbors on authoritarianism:

He says everthing [sic] that is right, but what he actually does conforms with his authoritarian leanings. He is extremely competitive and ambitious; he wouldn’t be the nominee if he weren’t. He gew [sic] up without a father and substitutes his “heavenly father” to make up for the loss; he is a true believer. And we all know how dangerous they are.

Setting aside for the moment the lack of personal religious experience at the heart of so many of Obama’s critics both inside the democratic party and out, let’s focus on her notion that Obama says everything that’s “right, but. . .” Ask yourself why he says everything that’s right, if he really means none of it? The deeply ingrained cynicism of such a view is of course, lamentable, but ultimately it’s the insinuation that Obama is a shallow, lying deceiver just like Bush, Cheney, or Rove, that he has no real values at all, that smells up the place. Such a lack of discernment results from a completely debilitated ability to trust, and is the ultimate cost of cynicism.

“And we all know how dangerous they are.” Let the term “True believers” be defined here as anyone on the planet with a genuine spiritual awareness through their own personal religious experience. To every appearance, Obama is such a person. But “dangerous”? True believers in Jesus actually believe “Love your enemies” is a superior philosophy to “kill your enemies.” Hence, Obama’s commitment to withdraw from Iraq, and not launch American wars of choice.
And his recent decisions, which have caused a chorus of caterwauling among some of his supporters, probably the same ones who recoiled at the spiritual fervor Obama engendered in many of his other early supporters, are all positions that place the highest values of a truth-driven political prodigy right out there for all to marvel at, or complain about. Discuss.

“He g[r]ew up without a father and substitutes his “heavenly father” to make up for the loss; he is a true believer“

Non-religious minds can plop out such a thoughtless notion because it seems so logical. But anyone who truly knows God as a Father does so, not to fill the physical void of an absent or inadequate earthly father, but because they have already learned the value of such a divine Father through their experiences with an earthly father figure. Every child is wholly dependent on his parents and the home life for all his early concepts of everything intellectual, social, moral, and even spiritual; all that he can first know of either human or divine relationships comes from the family. Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father, makes it reasonably clear that most of that guidance came from a loving Grandfather, Grandmother, Father, however briefly, Step-father, and Mother all of whom, to my mind, must have done a superb job, based on what little we can observe of Obama’s spiritual relationship with God as a Father.

America’s political ship has steamed out of the sheltered bays of established old-politics tradition, and has begun its perilous cruise upon the high seas of evolutionary destiny. The only real question is, does America want Obama— a genuine religionist— the “real deal” at the helm, or McCain— a genuine fraud. As never before in our history, the soul of America had better carefully scrutinize the charts of our highest shared values, and therein find the trust the new captain will need from us if he is to steer us true.

Unity— Not Uniformity!!