Editor,
We live in dire straits. The average American must feel sorry and pity the nation.
Today, not even the most stubborn patriot can muscle up enough impertinence to claim against all odds that we live in formidable times. Too many illusions have been destroyed during George Bush's illegitimate and criminal presidency.
The point has been reached when we have run out of positive terms to describe the Bush legacy. The Republican house of cards has collapsed. The Bush presidency is a nightmare that will haunt this nation for generations.
The lame duck Bush is no longer the problem. Bush is history. His brutal and stupid legacy is sealed. His face has become America's emblem. His words and actions define this country. He will be remembered as the protestant pope who defied science against reason to advance apocalyptic illusions of a corrupted religion.
He has promoted a cartoonish militant Christianity as the trivial religion of American capitalism. Congress is now the problem, since it refuses to act on the facts that implicate this administration in a genocidal war that was based on blatant lies.
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One simply can no longer blame Republicans for who they are. Who would blame the devil for being diabolic? But when a party promises salvation only to prolong and participate in evil, one knows that Democrats are not better either.
Democrats supported Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. They could stop his war now. Since they don't, this is their war, too. The Democratic leadership is complicit in U.S. torture practices. They are also implicated in the abolition of basic civil and human rights.
One must be suicidal to trust the Democrats. None of their candidates promise to put an end to the war and pay reparations to a crippled country. They will maintain Bush's military presence in Iraq and continue his wars.
The American citizen has also been abandoned by the Christian churches, whose task it should be to unmask the farce and decry the lie of evangelical hypocrisy.
There is no such thing as a Christian nation. A Christian president of the U.S. is a contradiction in terms. One cannot be the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and believe in the truth of the Sermon on the Mount.
Honesty requires a decision that is made one way or another. The current occupant of the White House has made his. The self-acclaimed "war president" has chosen war, lies and torture as a means of politics, which means he has rejected Jesus Christ to assert himself as an anti-Christ.
The national and international community ought to acknowledge this truth. If Al Gore shares the Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one should invent the "Savage War Prize" and give it to Bush and his allies.
It should come with the penance of repentance, preferably in The Hague. A little bit of honesty would do this nation some good, and for that matter also the rest of the world. Its power can be redemptive.
Joachim L. Oberst
UNM instructor
