Another Update

We at the bureau periodically write about what is going on behind the scenes based on the idea that we have very vivid imaginations and enough hubris to think we can read between the lines from the news.

Well, first up is the religious right. We try to remain light-hearted in the face of these people, but it is difficult. It is often amusing to hear arguments propounded by those of this particular political bent, knowing with absolute certainty that the arguments have no basis in fact.

Probably the most depressing of this sort of thing in recent history is the so-called 'ground zero mosque', which is neither at ground zero nor a mosque; it is a proposed location some two blocks away from ground zero.

One of the few things we know for certain about the founding fathers of this country is that they had no intention of ever letting religion in any way enter into government policy. So strident was their concern that it was the first thing they put into the bill of rights.

So, from a strict constitutional perspective, or from a perspective that any reasoned student of history would assume the founding fathers espoused, the building of this mosque is a non-issue. Also, the Jesus of the New Testament certainly does not seem to care about other religions except to periodically point out that being a member of some religious club did not automatically result in salvation, as in the parable of the good Samaritan, with which most of us ought to be familiar.

Further, Jesus told his followers to 'turn the other cheek' over things of far greater import than the possibility that some Muslims might have less distance to travel to get to their religious meetings. All this is easily summed up in a slightly misapplied quote from Jesus, 'truly, they have their reward'.

See, Christians are supposed to be concerned with things in heaven, 'so heavenly minded they're no earthly good' as was wittily put by some pastor in the long lost memory of the editor. Instead, they're combating illegal immigrants, arguing for torture of people who may or may not at one point have been sympathetic to terrorists, and so on, clearly not things the 'Prince of Peace' would occupy himself with.

This post has already descended into a rant, but the point is that there is little in the way of truth or fact entering the discussion on the religious right. This being said, the left is also quite lost. Much has been said in the left about how moneyed interests have manufactured the tea party movement, for instance.

See, the left is pretty certain it knows what should be done, and any reasonable person would agree with them. So, their first effort was to paint the tea partiers as unreasonable. The problem with this argument, of course, is that there are just too many tea partiers and many people personally know at least one, knowing that the one they know is not actually crazy.

When the attempt to paint the tea partiers as crazy fringe kooks beached itself heavily on a pile of facts obvious to everybody, they decided that the tea party movement was primarily driven by corporate funds, which, of course, is just silly. The demented nature of some of the commentators on the left appears to force them to not even be able to admit that there is a large body of people simply fed up with the overbearing, overweening, overlarge federal system, and are tired of the continuous bloating.

The internet has helped a lot, and the fact is that many of these movements are not classic centralized managed political movements but rather self-organizing and self-perpetuating because the average voter no longer trusts their leaders. Put simply, the tea party movement itself shows that a significant minority, possibly a majority of people in the US do not listen to their putative leaders anymore, whether conservative or liberal.

Yes, the tea party is not listening to the conservatives, either. The tea party has no interest in making itself about religion, sensing that to be a mistake. The hijacking of the conservative movement by the religious right gave us eight years of GW Bush.

Instead, there are a lot of moderate religious people, who believe in rights rather than in forcing the government to adopt a particular religion. Also, there are quite a few people in this group who are apostolic christians, a group that believes that religion has no bearing in governance but that governance must be moral and ethical, as well as respective of personal rights.

So, the tea party contains a wide spectrum of religious people, and irreligious people, conservatives to moderates, even some liberals, and is populated with lots of average Joes with decentralized, almost anarchic organization.

The point of this post, to wrench this screed back on topic, is that the primary argument put forward on a regular basis on this site, that what is happening does not correlate well to what is being seen in the news, is, hopefully, now clearly so. With little effort, the reader can scour the internet and find hundreds of different stories and theories, all of them contradictory, which is healthy. Yet the government is harassing anti-war authors, calling them terrorists. Or, maybe they are terrorists...