POLITICAL "BLINDNESS"

Sometimes, my blogs include a good deal of political commentary, but little emphasis on the "Christian", which would fully represent my label in the blogsphere. Today, while not being "preachy", yet in keeping with political commentary, I humbly submit the following for your consideration.

This morning, I was reading my Bible and the reading for today was the ninth chapter of the Book of St. John. You may wonder what does biblical scripture have to do with the title of this blog entry, "Political Blindness". For those of you who are Christian, you're probably half-way, if not 3/4 of the way to the meaning of today's entry. For the rest of you, I have patience that you will understand what I want to say here.

The ninth chapte of St. John chronicles the miracle that were performed by Jesus. As you may know, Jesus healed the sick, fed the hungry and gave generously to the poor. At every instance, He met people who were in need of something, and He met them at their level of need. Likewise, unless we've become cynical in our regard for our elected officials, we want them to meet some of our needs, and at the point of our needs. You would have to be buried under a rock or drunk on political kool-aid to realize that's not happening and probably stopped around 1980. But what caught my attention as I read the ninth chapter of St. John, was that Jesus performed mighty miracles, and instead of the masses being happy about it, they sought to discredit both the miracles and Jesus at the same time. They didn't want to acknowledge God among them. Specifically, in John 9:25, after He healed a blind man, the Pharisees immediately wanted to diss Jesus for healing the man on the Sabbath, instead of looking at the fact that the man, who had been blind from birth, could now see, both physically and spiritually.

It is the same with our elected officials. Instead of the Democrats prasing DNC Chair Howard Dean for telling the truth about how the GOP has been hypocritical in their representation, some Democrats, really prominent ones, like Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Harold Ford, all took to the airwaves to immediately "distance" themselves from Dr. Dean's remarks. Never mind that he was telling the truth - these individuals took excerpts from Dr. Dean's remarks and placed them in a context he never intended. The miracle, had they stopped from their rush to "distance" themselves, was the fact that for once, a Democrat did not accept the lies being perpetrated by the GOP about him. He called them out on it. The miracle for long-suffering members of the Democratic Party, was that someone finally gave voice to what we have been waiting for from those who purport to "speak for us".

The "Downing Street Memorandum" is another "miracle". For years, many of us suspected that the President and his Cabinet flat out lied to get the American Public to support going to war with Iraq. But we didn't have any concrete evidence of the lies. Then someone in Britain, known only as "C" leaked the document which proves beyond a reasonable doubt, that both the President and Prime Minister Tony Blair, looked the American and British people, not to mention the whole world in the face...and lied to us about the reasons for attacking Iraq. While they were telling us they hadn't considered it, it had already been considered and was actually priority #1 for the Bush Administration. So how is the memo being received, here in America?

It is being received with very little silence! Almost no media coverage at all. When asked about the memo in public, Bush and Blair "poo-poohed" the memo and blew it off. The miracle that was missed was two-fold:

1. Neither one denied that the contents of the memo were accurate; and,
2. Neither one denied the memo's existance, or claimed it was a forgery.

Let me be clear about my personal belief here: God answered the prayers of the downtrodden, and when I say "downtrodden", I'm talking abour people who can't make their voices heard, because some trash-talking individual is shouting them down, calling them delusional or "over the top" and implying that the individual has no one that loves him but his mother. In other words, I'm talking about people like you and me.

We've already had five years of having unqualified and rabidly ideological judges crammed down our throats; we've had five years of the most horrible and Orwellian legislation forced onto the masses without so much as a whimper of protest from those who should be shouting the loudest: OUR DEMOCRATIC LEADERS AND THOSE WHO ARE PERCEIVED AS BEING THE NEXT GENERATIONS OF LEADERS! We've endured increased poverty and the ruinination of our environment, while the corporate minorities are getting bulging bank accounts in exchange for the duplicity on the parts of our elected officials. While John Conyers is trying to get a hearing for the Downing Street Memo, he's told by Sensenbrenner and other Republican thug leaders that no Democrats can call for hearings in the Rayburn, Cannon, Longsworth or other Capitol Hill facility. When Stephanie Tubbs-Jones stood with Barbara Boxer in objecting to the certification of the Ohio voting results (and I really expected Cheney to drop an F-bomb here), John Kerry was missing in action.

When evidence of wrong-doing on the part of the Bush Administration continues to surface from whatever forum, all you see are GOP gadflies beating it back into the closet from which it spilled, with assistance from a stenographer's pool that used to be the MSM, and cheerleading and spin from the likes of the usual suspect's: "Falafel" O'Reilly, Hannity, "Oxycontin" Limbaugh and Pat Robertson. Why aren't they protesting that the President had dinner with a porn star last night? Because she's a registered Republican, and that makes it okay?

Is it any coincidence that, upon examination, most of the Bush Administration have criminal records, yet hold very high political positions that have the potential for committing treason by their very employment? All of these examples are miracles, in the sense that they are revealed, despite the GOP's best efforts to keep them hidden and buried. No wonder they dissed FBI informant Mark "Deep Throat" Felt for doing his civic duty and ratting out Nixon's attempt to hijack democracy. The real miracle came that people accepted Felt's actions and dismissed the commentaries from those who got sent to jail behind Felt's information: Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy - known felons, thank you very much!

The miracle is that the efforts of the GOP to lie, cheat and steal democracy from us; or to steal, kill and destroy democracy, continue to be revealed on an almost hourly basis. Yet our elected Democratic Leaders are still looking for miracles when the miracles are already in front of them if they chose to renounce being politically blinded by power, prestiege and corporate campaign donations in order to see that their support for such legislation, while cutting off the leader of the Democratic Party at the knees, borders on treasonous blasphemy.

Our leaders refuse to look at the evidence before them; and the evidence of wrongdoing on the part of this Administration being revealed is a miracle. They refuse to acknowledge that the President is a liar and a hypocrite - both in thoughts, words and deeds. They refuse to realize they have been hoodwinked, bamboozled and the GOP is running amok on their behinds. So, when will they admit they admit to political blindness, and apologize to us for not seeing the miracles they have been given to unite and take back our country?