Pray to God

So, Bush, I see where you dodged a nasty bullet again yesterday, caving in just enough on the issue of your domestic spying program to get the minimal Republican support your needed. The agreement "hashed out between Vice President Dick Cheney and Republicans critical of the program" (NYT) appears to let you off the hook of a possible investigation. Damn! It galls me, honestly, when I think of how many hot investigations would now be in progress if a Democratic president were in your place, with so many lies, ineptitudes and bloody blunders on his record, and a Republican Congress at his heels. If he hadn't been impeached three times over by now, it would have been a miracle.

What have we done, we American voters, to surrender ourselves, our lives, our collective reputation in the world to such abuses? It does seem, to one following the polls, that we're beginning to recognize our unforgivable mistake. And yet, in speaking of forgiveness, there are still those who persist in their denial. The voices of a number of good Christian women interviewed on National Public Radio yesterday continue to echo uncomfortably in my mind. They voted for you, and continue to support you because you avow so often, with such a show of piety, that you pray to God before you make decisions. Is that all it takes? A show? Oh yes, they say, he's made mistakes. Do we approve of everything he does? No. Like our husbands, not everything he does is something we agree with. But we forgive him, just as we forgive our husbands. Because he prays to God before he makes decisions. People blame him for the terrible things that happen, they say, but he can't be held responsible for all the bad things that happen in the world. The wars, the terrorist attacks, the hurricanes...

Well, no. Let's be clear. Your critics are not blaming you for all those things. Rather, they're blaming you for the inappropriateness and the incompetence of your response. Those forgiving Christian voices frankly scare me, Bush. At what point might these people stop forgiving you for mistakes that cost--or risk--the lives of thousands of American soldiers? For your apparent callous disregard for warnings of disaster? For your ignorant, bull-headed contempt for science--both its potential benefits and its dire warnings? For the bully tactics that characterize your whole approach to the rest of the world? (As an aside, your Cheney's thinly veiled threats against Iran yesterday were met with immediate ridicule from those he chose to threaten. These tactics don't even work any more. They make America look weak.) Do we forgive you for your imperious contraventions of the US constitution and the law, at home and abroad--your scorn for international treaties? No amount of praying to God will compensate for these wrong-headed attitudes and misjudgments.

If I were to vote for a person on the strength of praying to God, I'd also be looking for someone upon whom God might seem to look more favorably. Your fervent prayer before the hurricane, made public in that now-infamous tape, was curiously ineffective. And the mess the world is in does not speak highly of your personal relationship with the Higher Power. No disrespect, Bush, but it seems to me that God has not been doing you any notable favors, these past few years. Nor the rest of us, of course. You claim to talk to Him, but is He listening?