John Cole is on a roll:
This is so patently offensive that I don’t have adequate words to describe how truly wrong this is:
As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush’s nominees. Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."
If you don’t share our politics, you hate the baby Jesus.
If you don’t share our politics, you hate religious people.
If you don’t share our politics, you are evil.
Congrats, Republicans. Our leaders have now taken the traditional rhetorical demonization of our opposition and elevated it to heavenly heights.
That pretty much sums up my view on the current Schiavo-induced madness. (Which is not to say that the madness lacks method: f’instance, I think we can all safely assume that Senator Frist is looking gearing up for a 2008 run.)
Read the whole thing, and don’t miss his update in response to Hugh Hewitt‘s post.
That Hugh Hewitt take on this all is the most astonishingly concise argument for self-irrelevance I’ve ever read.
I used to watch Hugh Hewitt occasionally back when he was a fairly obscure commentator in LA. He was an idiot then, and he is an idiot now. That anyone pays attention to him is truly depressing.
About the actual issue: I’d be really interested in what the Baby Jesus thinks of Bill Frist. — I mean: to reiterate a point I made in another thread, if you believe in God (the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim God, at least), you believe that He is a person, with a will of His own. Before speaking for Him, and announcing that He supports the attempt to do away with the filibuster, you’d think a certain caution might be in order.
In dealing with ordinary humans, we exercise this caution: thus, anyone who hangs out on this blog, and has even the most rudimentary social skills, will figure out fairly quickly that mindreading is regarded as presumptuous and rude.
But I would have thought that the rudeness of just assuming that some fellow blogger has some particular motive would be much less bad than assuming that God thinks a certain way. Moreover, the consequences of confusing what you want and what God thinks are a lot worse: not just rudeness, but possible damnation. So why don’t Frist et al seem troubled by this?
I didn’t read the whole article, just the snippet. Based on the snippet, it’s hard to see where anyone is claiming to speak for God. Someone’s claiming to speak for all (or at least some significant majority) of people of faith, but that’s a whole ‘nother species of stupid.
A more accurate poster for the event would show Scalia with a Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other – “He shouldn’t have to choose.”
I’ve been reading John Cole a bit lately and I feel sympathy for him. I keep wanting to write in and say, “Good job seeing the light” or something similarly dumb; also, “Don’t make any political decisions in the grip of emotion – wait until there’s a pause before reevaluating your loyalties.” Do I think he was a hackish partisan before and do I only agree with his current posts because they suit me politically, or do I have to go back and reevaluate his old arguments against my cherished views because this proves he’s 0% hackish? Anyway, I’ve been meaning to put up a post about this incoherent jumble of feelings at my note-to-self blog but incoherent jumbles turn out to be hard to describe.
This is the really nice blog posted by John Cole this time.