But, it's not Welfare, so it's OK!

Ok, so when black people or Mexicans need a government bailout so they can eat or something, that's WELFARE, and that's BAD! BAD BAD! They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! They should not have made those mistakes!

But, when Wall Street banks need a government bailout, well, that's ok. Also, if you are an aspiring suburbanite who bought a house you can't afford, you can get a government bailout and that's ok too.

I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the latter class (Wall Street/pretentious dumbass) tends to be white. And Republican. Because for all the griping people do about their hard-earned money going to welfare: HEY! Two Hundred Million of your Hard Earned Dollars just went to some guys up in NYC who have more money right now than you will ever make in your entire life! We could have fed and clothed the poor population in the country for YEARS. YEARS!

Oh, right. They're black. Or wetba---- I mean Mexicans. And we don't like them, do they? They are LAZY! All of them! It's genetic.

Also, homosexuals are worse then Terrorists and are converting your two-year-olds.

War? What war? You mean the one we've been in for five years that we started? The one which has had 83974238 turning points? And on which we have spend more Hard Earned Dollars than I care to think about because my student loan interest is compounding by the nanosecond (also, we could have fed everyone in the country on steak for a few centuries)? Yes! That one!

Clearly caused by the homos.

How Stinky is Too Stinky?

This guy posted a good article discussing this picture. It turns up that he's a megachurch pastor and we know how I feel about that, but we will let that slide for a moment. I do not have to like his methods to acknowledge his point.

I left a comment on the blog of Shae (who is the pastor of a church in Baytown and a good guy), who was asking if Jesus (Christ) of Nazareth would wash the feet of the bin Laden (I had not yet looked closely enough at the photo to figure out quite who was whom, but it does not affect my point):

Why wouldn’t Jesus wash the feet of bin Laden? Look at the others in the picture — [edit: Kofi Annan], Merkel, Blair, Bush, [edit: former president of China], and I think the king of Jordan [edit: India] — arguably, [Annan] and Merkel are the only two who are, at least politically, more “worthy” of having their feet washed by Jesus. Mandela has been married three times [True, but he's not in the picture]. Merkel is, of course, Lutheran and a physicist and is therefore superior in all ways [I stand by this statement].

Does Osama fit the mortal definition of evil? He certainly fits -my- definition of evil, being that he willingly contributed to the deaths of quite a mass of people. Bush and Blair did/do similar. Are they less evil? Are they less evil because the people to whose deaths they are contributing are overwhelmingly a) brown and b) not Christians?

If “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (1 New Testament Some:where) then Merkel is no more worthy than Bush who is no more worthy than bin Laden who is no more worthy than me. Or Ann Richards. And, to say anything else is not only a double standard, but is to directly contradict Scripture. That is my theological argument.

My personal argument is that maybe if we’d go about washing each other’s feet more often instead of griping about sheetheads, dykes, and godless liberal sheetheaded dykes, maybe this wouldn’t be an issue and we could blog about bunnies or something.

I also stand by my statement regarding bunnies. At any rate, this fellow Boyd points out that we tend to allow patriotism to take precedence over our alleged Christianity (someone said that nationalism was one of the greater threats to Christianity ever seen by the human race. Or, I could have just made that up). God is clearly on -our- side because -we- are the good guys. Also, we have "In God We Trust" stamped on our money and that therefore makes God like us more. After all, the only way He can get any attention is by being put on some mortals' currency. Forget black holes and the Grand Canyon, those are laaaame compared to being acknowledged on the same object as George Washington.

This, I believe, is the tiny bit of something that started hurting inside of my brain as I watched the news of us bombing Baghdad and Silver Foot Junior intoning that God is (sniff) on our side. It is also one of the somethings which prevents my saying the pledge of allegiance. The something is "Who the Hell are we to judge who God likes?" I feel like we are the hanger-on kid, the one on the playground who when the big popular kid looks at him goes skipping home to his mom yelling, "He likes me! I'm popular! I'm one of the cool kids!" It's like we have to have some kind of validation, and once we think we have it, we can start beating up on the other unpopular kids because we think we're cool now.

This is starting to make me think about people interpreting the Bible to mean not at all what it means, which is a completely, utterly different subject and one into which I do not care to delve at this time. My final point is, however, that if anyone gets to have their stinky feet washed by Jesus, both physically and metaphorically, then so does everyone. God's grace is universal, and if it weren't, it wouldn't be grace. If God's grace is universal, then ours should be as well.

At Last, a Ray of...oh. nevermind.

"Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical, and it is not the only option before us."

Oh, good, the President is seeing the light, and we are going to withdraw from Iraq, stop executions, and not ever bomb civilians ever again...

Oh, wait. Those people are already outside the womb. They don't count anymore, unless they are in a coma. My bad.

What the Hell kind of country do we live in?

"How did they manage to get that close to him? They're ruffling his hair and hugging him! We can't even ask the guy questions!"

That's another John Stewartism. And he's damn right. Bush went to Albania at the end of his European tour and received a hero's welcome. There's footage of him being hugged and squeezed and called George, and the Albanians really just think he's the shit. We have foreign people rubbing his head for good luck (hopefully not to improve their English), and we can't even get in to talk to the guy unless we are on a vetted list of people that his people know will a) agree with every damn thing he says and b) will ask him softball questions pursuant to a).

The question, of course, arises as to whether those people were actually vetted and behind them were a bunch of snarky Albanians, or perhaps just Albanians who don't care. I want to know, personally, why the Albanians think Bush is so great. What has he done that makes the Albanians like him so much? That could perhaps be the best reason for why they like him. What, exactly, has Bush done to make the residents of Albania regard him with anything other than apathy?

Well, according to the BBC, it's that his visit allegedly makes it more feasible for Albania to join the EU and NATO, and Bush supports the UN's plan for Kosovo to become independent. This could just be me, but I fail to see how Bush's support has anything at all to do with Albania's membership in the EU, given that the United States has less than nothing to do with the EU. In this same vein, it really seems to me that Albania should care more about what the other European countries think about any given subject than what we think.

But more importantly, my disgust with a president who is more available to foreign citizens on foreign soil than to the people he allegedly serves is absolute.