Is Bush the AntiChrist?

Well, I think we aren't supposed to be speculating about when the end will come. "No one knows the day or the hour."

Nobody expects the Bush administration

I'm a Democrat. So when Bush got "elected," I expected a lot of bad things to come from his administration. But I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. But then.....


Really there is just no excuse for this. Absolutely none. Yeah, I've heard the arguments. If you caught the ringleader of a terrorist group who had bombs planted all over New York, and the only way you could find out where they were was to torture the guy, would you do it. I'm enough of a Kantian to say no even in this case. But this assumes something that clearly isn't true--that we could get the information from him by torture and in no other way. Torture victims talk, but they say whatever they think the captor wants to hear in order to get the torture to stop.

Oh, but we're being told that this isn't torture. The last president had an interesting definition of sexual relations. I think this definition is a tad more serious. The people of this country have to insist that this practice be ended permanently, and if that means not approving the attorney general, or impeaching the President, so be it. This isn't a liberal issue, it's not a conservative issue, it's not a Republican or Democrat issue, it's an ethical issue. Pure and simple.

My argument against the war in Iraq

My argument against the Iraq war
Shiites believe that the true successors of Muhammad were murdered and the succession went to the wrong people. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Muslim who ruled a country with a 2-1 Shiite majority with the power of the sword. The US invaded Iraq, and ejected Saddam from power. Apparently the argument from weapons of mass destruction fell apart upon close inspection, but the most laudable of the motivations that the Bush Administration might have had for going in there was the idea that if we could set up a democracy in Iraq, we could set up a model for other Middle Eastern Islamic countries to follow. The idea was that other countries in the Islamic would be able to see what democracy can do and would want to have democracies in their own countries. So the Islamic world would gratefully see the advantages of American democratic political institutions and anti-American terrorism would be de-motivated.
Unfortunately, this plan had a snowball’s chance in Baghdad of working. Democracy doesn’t work unless the religious majority is prepared to allow the religious minority religious freedom. Will Shiites give that to the Sunnis, whom they consider to be usurpers of the true Islam and assassins of its true leaders? So long as religious minorities don’t get religious freedom, all you’re ever going to get is a tyranny of the majority. Hence the Sunnis are fighting against us, and many of the Shiites don’t want us around either.
Islam, unlike Christianity, is from its very founding a religion that seeks rulership. Whatever its merits may be, it seems constitutionally incapable of accepting the idea of church-state separation. At least, those who might be willing to accept a de-politicized conception of Islam are not likely to be found in Iraq. I have always thought that had we understood Buddhism better, we might have avoided the colossal blunder we committed in Vietnam. Had we understood Islam, we perhaps might also have avoided the even more colossal blunder in Iraq.