From The Toronto Star, 3/27/05:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1111878609610&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
Republicans have become `a party of theocracy'
By Maureen Dowd
Oh my God, Americans really are in a theocracy.
Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all
branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not
having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a
wholly owned subsidiary of the church?
The more dogma-driven activists, self-perpetuating pols and
ratings-crazed broadcast media prattle about "faith," the less we
honour the credo that a person's relationship with God should remain a
private matter.
As the Bush White House desperately manoeuvres in Iraq to prevent the
new government from being run according to the dictates of religious
fundamentalists, it desperately manoeuvres here to pander to religious
fundamentalists who want to dictate how the government should be run.
Maybe President George Bush should spend less time preaching about
spreading democracy around the world and more time worrying about our
deteriorating democracy.
Even some Republicans seemed appalled at this latest illustration of
Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that "morality is the best of all
devices for leading mankind by the nose."
As Christopher Shays, one of five House Republicans who voted against
the bill to allow the Terri Schiavo case to be snatched from Florida
state jurisdiction and moved to federal court, put it:
"This Republican party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy.
There are going to be repercussions from this vote."
A CBS News poll Wednesday found that 82 per cent of the public was
opposed to Congress and the president intervening in this case; 74 per
cent thought it was all about politics.
The president, who couldn't be dragged outdoors to talk about the more
than 100,000 people who died in the horrific tsunami, was willing to
be dragged out of bed to sign a bill about one woman his base had
fixated on.
But with the new polls, the White House seemed to shrink back a bit.
The scene on Capitol Hill this past week has been almost as absurdly
macabre as the movie Weekend at Bernie's, with Tom DeLay and Bill
Frist propping up between them this poor woman in a vegetative state
to indulge their own political agendas.
DeLay wanted to show that he is still a favourite of conservatives.
Dr. Frist has become a laughingstock by trying to rediagnose Schiavo's
condition by video.
Republicans easily abandon their cherished principles of individual
privacy and states' rights when their personal ambitions come into
play.
The first time they snatched a case out of a Florida state court to
give to a federal court, it was Bush vs. Gore.
This time, it's Bush vs. Constitution.
While Senate Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who are trying to curry
favour with red staters, meekly allowed the shameful legislation to be
enacted, at least some Floridian lawmakers decided to put up a fight,
though they knew they couldn't win.
The president and his ideological partners don't believe in separation
of powers.
They just believe in their own power.
First they tried to circumvent the Florida courts; now they're trying
to pack the federal bench with conservatives and even blow up the
filibuster rule.
But they may yet learn a lesson on checks and balances, as the federal
courts rebuffed them in the Schiavo case.
But even as he exploits this one sad case, DeLay has voted to slash
medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to care for poor people in
nursing homes, some on feeding tubes.
DeLay made his stake clear at a conference two Fridays ago organized
by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group.
He said God had brought Schiavo's struggle to the forefront "to help
elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."
He defined that as "attacks against the conservative movement, against
me and against many others."
So it's not about her crisis at all.
It's about his crisis.
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"The mission of the Christian Coalition is simple. It is to mobilize
Christians -- one precinct at a time, one community at a time -- until
once again we are the head and not the tail, and at the top rather
than the bottom of our political system. The Christian Coalition will
be the most powerful political force in America by the end of this
decade. We have enough votes to run this country...and when the people
say, 'We've had enough,' we're going to take over!"
--Pat Robertson
Harry
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