It’s been a few days since I’ve posted — I’m afraid the germ-filled air on my flight home as well as a lingering visit by the Back Pain Fairies had me not feeling so well. But it’s given me time to formulate an argument supporting my contention that the United States, through the sovereignty of a just and holy God, has experienced eight years of judgment under the George W. Bush administration.
We elected Bush in 2000, the crest of a new millennium and a clear break, to conservatives, from the sex and scandal-laden years of the Clinton era. I’m not a fan of Bill Clinton; I think he was a largely immoral, hypocritical user trading far too much on charm and wit and not nearly enough on intelligence and principle. However, spending a few hundred million bucks exploring the vagaries of his private sex life seems to me to have been unwise — the public funding of a GOP vendetta against an economically and societally successful president, disguised as a quest for truth, morality, and traditional values. Nonetheless, all sides can agree that the dawning of the Bush 2 administration was a new start, albeit one that terrified liberals as much as it comforted conservatives.
(I also believe that Bush’s cronies stole the election, period. But they’ll have to face God on that one, and face Him they will).
Bush’s first term, marked as it was by 9/11, could have lifted up the people of the United States, elevating our finest ideals and enacting policies that stood firm against evil without responding in kind. Bush may have been unprepared for the attacks of 9/11, but he and his neo-cons were certainly prepared to wage war against Iraq. It made no sense before the attacks, made even less afterwards, and remains a testimony to the evil in mens’ hearts, displayed on an international level and realized in the tears of every American and Iraqi parent grieving the loss of their child. Bush came into office either too dumb or too malleable to avoid war at any provocation, and when 9/11 came, the door, hinges greased in eagerness, swung open for an unprovoked attack and an immoral invasion of a country that did us no harm.
The first few years of the Bush administration, then, were fruit from a poisoned tree, and the stench of war was augmented by the rotting economy his fund-war/cut-taxes policy brought about. Indifference to the poor is the kindest possible description of what could bring about such insanity; I prefer “utter contempt” and “shocking dismissal.” The middle class suffered and the underclass shattered, and the war against the poor at home continues unabated, just as the war against Iraq thunders along today.
And, astonishingly, the American people rejected a genuine war hero and decent man and elected Bush again in 2004.
The Brits asked how so many millions of people could be so dumb. Perhaps the question is how so many supposedly God-fearing voters could vote not only against their own self-interest, but for the very things that the truly religious ought to reject with fervor. It’s difficult for me to accept that Bush won his first term largely because of people whipped into a frenzy by illicit sex in the Oval Office, but it continues to boggle the mind that American voters cast their lot with him again — when evidence of Bush lies, pre-9/11 war planning, an economy beginning to skid, and the multiplying hardships endured by the poor on whose backs the rich enjoyed tax breaks were all startlingly in view. The wealthy Right got what it wanted, and the Religious Right handed it to them in a chalice.
I believe that the evil perpetrated by Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al, is unprecedented in American history. And, after reading eminent prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s “The Impeachment of George W. Bush on Murder Charges,” I’m also convinced that he is at best a war criminal and more accurately a common thug whose indifference to life, blind faith in his own gut, stunning anti-intellectualism, and mission to please those smarter and more evil than him informed his every presidential move. The thuggish and the thick generally aren’t too dangerous to too many people; the thuggish and the thick given enormous power have brought us and Iraq to where we are today.
Because I believe in a sovereign, personal and holy God who knows all and is thwarted by nothing, I have to conclude that He allowed the United States to suffer as it has under two terms of a Bush presidency. I don’t know why; further, I don’t know why the Iraqi people were allowed to be slaughtered and to slaughter our own men and women forced to fight an unwinnable, immoral, unneeded war. But God doesn’t exercise His sovereignty in ways that are always pleasant for us. We all know when we’ve been blessed; we tend to explain away when we’ve been disciplined or placed under judgment by our Lord. Those who call us a “Christian nation,” who kindle fires of hostility and division and trade in violence and bigotry, who trample the poor under their well-shod feet and pretend not to notice, and who wail about the killing of fetuses (who I believe are children, by the way, known and loved by God) while applauding the killing of innocents abroad and the slow death of those at home, are the ones who’ve brought about the judgment of a God who takes no joy in levying punishment, but also brooks no favor with those who mock Him.
The reality that we chose to be governed by a man so ill-prepared to be president, just because he claimed Jesus as Savior, and that we gave a second term to the arrogant-bumblers-turned-vicious-mercenaries he chose to surround himself with, is sobering. I imagine historians will puzzle over it for decades, perhaps centuries. But right now is the time to realize that God judges nations who seek blood and trample the poor and dispense with justice, and our national religion of flag-waving and Jesus as Best Republican not only doesn’t shield us from judgment, but invites it.
May God have mercy on us all.