VP Candidate Paul Ryan

November 5, 2012:

Republican VP hopeful Rep.Paul Ryan (R-Wis) saved an impassioned pitch to religiously motivated voters as a last-minute attempt to sway potentially independent voters by using faith-based fear tactics to accuse President Barack Obama of undermining religious freedom in America.

“This is a huge election,” Ryan is quoted in a Huffington Post story. “Please know that Mitt Romney and I understand the stakes. We understand the stakes of where this country is headed. We understand the stakes of our fundamental freedoms being on the line, like religious freedom — such as how they’re being compromised in Obamacare.”

One issue. Dueling topics. 

Notice that the desperate candidate cannot manage to stick to one topic at a time. He is objecting to a provision in the Obama Health Care plan that requires religious-based organizations to offer coverage in their health plans for birth control.

The Supreme Court already decided these issues

Those arguments were already decided and elevated to the Supreme Court, which ruled the health care provisions in Obamacare to be consitutional. The Supreme Court further denied hearing a specific case (SOURCE: ACLU) ‘that the ACA’s individual mandate provision violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a statute that precludes federal laws from placing a “substantial burden” on religious exercise unless the government has a compelling interest in enacting the law.

The courts determined there was no substantial burden placed on any faith-based organizations by the requirement to include birth control in their employer-managed health care plans.

So Paul Ryan’s argument is with the Supreme Court, not Barack Obama. The Supreme Court is notably more conservative in its leanings than our current President, so if Ryan wants to complain about the impingement of health care laws on religious freedom, he should castigate the same court that upheld a case in the Citizens United ruling that corporations have the same free speech (ne: spending rights on political campaigns) as people. Or perhaps it is time for Ryan to parrot the statement of Mitt Romney who said, “Corporations are people” with a related version that says “Churches are people too.” That would follow the same false logic in contending that religious freedom is not an individual right but a corporate right of churches and religiously-based organizations to wield in the administration of individual rights. In other words, individuals have no access to rights accept those determined by the corporations or faith-based organizations for whom they work. And frankly, that is where we are in America, right now.

Which is really ironic, because that brand of thinking places specific organizations as moderators of access to individual rights, which is a far worse (and currently real) form of rights infringement than government standards, which at least apply to all citizens equally.

A calculated misdirection of anger

But Ryan chooses to misdirect his anger at Obama, for politicl points. The Huff Post story says Ryan “added that Obama’s vision was “a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty and compromises those values — those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us a great and exceptional nation in the first place.”

Nutspeak and dog-whistles

That’s just nutspeak and dog-whistle threats to rally the GOP’s religious base, which is so confused by its own interpretations of the United States Constitution that many Americans are driving around with bumper stickers that show the Statue of Liberty holding up a Christian cross as a symbol of protecting religious freedom.

America’s so-called religious base is confused

That’s as confused as you can get. That bumper sticker alone shows that a big chunk of Americans do not even understand the concept of religious freedom, much less its interpretation in the public space.

Which is why thousands of churches still flaunt their political leanings, preaching to parishioners to “get out the vote” with tricky little conservative videos and thinly disguised pulpit talks throwing words around about abortion, gay rights and even the right to fight wars as real Christian values.

On the face of his statements, Paul Ryan seems confused in his inability to keep his political views separate from his religious desires. “President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith,” said the narrator in a Romney campaign ad in August. “Mitt Romney believes that’s wrong.”

Here Ryan likely is obscuring the real defense he is trying to make. Ryan’s own source of faith is the Catholic religion, a tradition that has publicly stated that all other churches and faiths pale in comparison to the one true faith. Coming from such a doctrinal tradition, it must be difficult for a conservative Catholic such as Paul Ryan to bite his tongue in public on a number of issues. The most significant may be his proposed partnership with devout Mormon Mitt Romney. Catholics are far from reconciled to Mormonism even as a brand of Christianity, much less one on par with the Roman Catholic tradition, for instance.

It seems Paul Ryan is cast with a dual or triple role on his hands. To reconcile his idea that religious freedom is at risk is to simultaneously an attempt to justify that his own church accepts the religion of his future superior, Mitt Romney. Some argue that Romney’s own faith requires him to place religious ideals before all other duties.

Never a clear case. On purpose. 

So we might forgive a little confusion on Paul Ryan’s part, acting his role as altar boy on a national stage that is far too complex for even he or Mitt Romney to handle. That is why that cannot make a clear case, or else they refuse (the most likely scenario) to make a clear case for all that they oppose. Because deep down, they oppose each other.

But rather than admit these deep inner conflicts in their personal and professional ideologies, they prefer to use the general confusion of the public’s lack of religious sophistication along with their own twisted brand of obscured political ideology to confuse people into “voting their values” whatever those may be.

So we find out a strange truth: This isn’t religious freedom they’re worried about, but religious differences they are afraid to expose, and the intolerances lurking just below the surface.

They use this confusion and fear to bury the public’s ability to distinguish truth from the fiction Ryan and Romney are trying to sell.

It’s too bad so many people are confused enough to buy it. Because America’s ultimate value as a nation is not so much its exceptionalism as its acceptionalism. That is real religious freedom. Freedom for all, not just the noisiest, most powerful Christians, and the Mormons they conveniently include when power is at stake.

The half-assed logo of Mitt Romney

If you haven’t noticed the similarities, the logo for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign looks a lot like half an ass. Which is fairly prophetic, because Mitt Romney’s campaign has been pretty much half-assed from the start. And it appears his Presidency would promise much of the same.

We’ve all been privy to Romney’s speaking gaffes, his propensity for lies and distortions and his inability to provide any detail or prove any benefits that would come about through his economic or tax policies. The gaps between his claims and the facts are starting to look more and more like a giant plumber’s crack into which the truth always falls.

Precursor: The half-assed legacy of the Bush Doctrine

America barely survived the half-assed antics of the last Republican President and Vice President. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney led the nation into an economic freefall produced by prodigiously cutting taxes on the richest Americans, starting two illegal, unbudgeted wars and ignoring the warning signals on national crises including 9/11, in which the Bush administration had fair warning and chose to ignore advice about terror threats.

That is the factor in the 2012 election that economists seldom mention. It was the half-assed approach to national security founded on an obsession with ideological wars that caused Bush & Co. to allow America to be attacked. That resulted in a weakened society and a weakened economy. In other words, Osama bin Laden’s stealth terror strategy worked against America because our own prodigious arrogance and exceptionalism made us vulnerable. That is a half-assed way of governing the nation, and from his threats toward Iran, Mitt Romney appears headed on a similar, yet far more dangerous course of foreign policy. He has chosen many members of Bush’s former advisory crew to run his administration. That’s good news for nobody.

Let’s say it loud and clear: Had Bush not been selfishly focused on his strange fixation of taking over the Middle East for oil and/or religious glory, the 9/11 attacks indeed could have been prevented.

We know that outgoing President Bill Clinton and the standing National Coordinator of Security Richard Clarke both provided plenty of warning about bin Laden, and Clarke sought an audience with Bush up to the day before the attacks. Yet Bush and Cheney were too busy plotting their pretty little war with Iraq to bother about the real threats to America. So we got hit, and hit hard.

Once the attack occurred, Bush promised with all the bluster of a military general to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Somewhere along the way during his distracted presidency, Bush openly complained it was too hard to search for America’s #1 terrorist threat, and that as president he never really thought much about bin Laden anymore.

Bush never finished either of the wars he started during his presidency. That is the sign of half-assed leadership. No plan = no victory, despite his claims of Mission Accomplished.

Half-assed victory

To make matters worse, the pet war started by Bush and Cheney was run in a half-assed manner from the moment they attacked. Principally, they could not be bothered to consider the cultural, social and tribal implications of taking over a country with a complex history. So instead they tried to gratuitously install an American-style government as if it were a turnkey operation. The first half-assed mistake was the failure to protect any of the nation’s cultural assets when Saddam Hussein fell from power. The only thing Bush and Cheney did think to do was grab the reigns to Iraq’s oil production, thereby promising that the proceeds would pay the cost of the war. That never happened of course. All these gaffes led to an influx and creation of more terrorists within the country, a phenomena the Bush crowd tried to quell by resorting to torture. It was an ugly scene, made worse by the fact that we were also neglecting responsibilities in Afghanistan. But that’s the half-assers way.

It all proves that an ideologically-driven foreign policy leads to a half-assed foreign policy, because having been conceived at 30,000 feet in the rare air of wishful thinking, it cannot envision or accommodate realities on the ground. It was simply unacceptable to conquer a country and let it fail so miserably from lack of planning.

A half-assed religious agenda

Worse yet was the fact that hidden agenda behind the war in Iraq was an apparent religious agenda to use the Mideast as some sort of launching ground for the Apocalypse. It seems that no matter what conservatives do in the modern age, the same sort of literalistic, legalistic and forceful brand of religion is hidden behind its motives.

What we might face with Mitt Romney in charge, an avowed Mormon, no one really knows. Even right wing leaders are suspicious of Mormonism. A casual visitor to the faith is often perplexed if they pick up the Book of Mormon, which appears to have been created sans historical fact, written from the vapors and produced out of whole cloth. Invented in other words, for some purpose that has little to do with the other major religions of the world. Jews, Muslim and Christian believers all share some of the same apparently historical foundations in their faith. Mormonism grabs those foundations and runs with them, claiming there was a race of people in North America about which there is no historical record. Which is rather a half-assed way of starting a religion.

Hence many religious leaders remain skeptical of Mormonism, while non-religious people think the whole religious trade a farce, half-assed in its assertions of an invisible deity running the world’s affairs. One can’t blame them at times. While the source of religious faith may be essentially invisible, the actions of the world’s religious leaders often aren’t; those being discrimination, intolerance, war-mongering, hatred, bigotry, torture, inquisitions, witch hunts, religious in-fighting and crusades of all manner and types.

Let’s face it, religion is pretty half-assed about its claims to bringing about world peace and harmony.

Romney is the New Bush. But not quite the same as the old Bush. 

Now we’re faced with the apparent king of all half-asses, Mitt Romney, the Mormon candidate who can’t even stick to one subject without lying his ass off or telling half-assed stories about why he thinks this or that is true. His performance in the presidential debates was cheerleadered by many conservatives who care not one whit whether anything he says is true. Yet even Fox News was slow behind the man until he was the nominee. That should tell you something.

What Fair and Balanced really means

The faux news people at Fox News no longer cares what Romney says, just that he wins. That is the summation, in fact, of the whole Fair and Balanced mantra. Fair means believe what we say. Balanced means conservatives should get what they want. So Fox plies that strategy by pumping out all sorts of single-message promises to constituencies concerned about gun rights, abortion, contraception, gays, religious freedom and legal decisions that favor these causes. There is no single narrative connecting these sundry causes, just the idea that Fair=Believe What We Way and Balanced = You Should Get What You Want.

How Fox News unwittingly created Mitt Romney

Fox News therefore deftly delivers exactly what the most selfish and fearful of Americans want in their media and their politics. And Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect product of the whole Fox ideology. A religion no one can touch without being castigated for being harsh or bigoted. An economic philosophy that is entirely ideological in nature, with no math attached, and therefore unassailable. A general ability to take the Etch-A-Sketch approach to thought leadership that closely aligns with the Fox News approach of issuing opinions on the new rather than reporting the facts. Mitt Romney was made for Fox News and made by Fox News.

Don’t bother me with the truth

The Romney campaign can’t even be bothered to tell these truthes to its American supporters. When fact-checking organizations take Romney to task his campaign replies that they cannot and will not be controlled by the facts. Now, even their own ads depend on lies layered with lies to make the points Romney is trying to make. Which is to trust him over Obama.

Romney’s half-assed approach to politics is the change positions all the time so that no one can hold him accountable for absolutely anything he’s ever said. His flip-flops are so profound they cannot even be grasped by a rational mind. He is literally debating himself in public. It is no wonder Barack Obama was so befuddled and depressed-looking in the first debate (which Romney supposedly one.) What is the right behavior when faced with a bald-faced liar in public? Obama took the high road in many respects, considerately reviewing in his mind just what was going on. That is what we expect a President to do with foreign leaders who lie in public; figure out what their real agenda is, and not call them to account until you can sort out the facts. So Obama treated Romney like a lying dictator. But Obama was publicly castigated for his debate Rope-A-Dope. And Romney took the lead as a result. What a sorry commentary on the naivete of our country and the half-assed abilities of half of Americans to figure out what’s really true.

The heartfelt goal of most Romney believers seems to be supporting their candidate against all evidence of fact or fact-checking. America can’t get any details on the what the man really wants to do. But the dog-whistle racists and ungrateful Americans who won’t credit Bush for any of the harm he caused the nation but seek to blame Obama for a slow recovery feel that Mitt Romney will somehow do a better job than Obama has done.

And that’s a pretty half-assed philosophy given a complete lack of evidence that Romney and his running partner Paul Ryan have any clue at all what they’re doing, or about to do if they get elected.

Sure, they’ll move to slash taxes. And further impoverish the nation. They’ll cut programs, and send millions of people into poverty and at risk for loss of health coverage and even death. They’ll privatize Social Security and give billions over to Wall Street brokers who frittered away America’s wealth once before. And they dump Medicare for a voucher program that old people will not comprehend or be able to manage. And people will die.

That’s Mitt Romney’s half-assed plan for America. But it will make complete asses out of all of us if he is elected.

So consider: Romney’s campaign logo shows an R that looks like half an ass underlined by the tagline: Believe in America. Yes, that’s really what it says. And now that you know that a liar is behind that logo and that slogan, what are you going to do, believe in him?

That would be a half-assed decision, for sure.

Snake Under Water

Anyone familiar with the Christian Bible and especially the Book of Genesis knows how the story goes when it comes to the temptation of Eve and the Fall of Man.

The serpent in Genesis is shown tempting Eve by putting thoughts in her mind that question the authority and verity of God. Genesis 3:1 [ The Fall ] Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

This piques Eve’s curiosity, and the serpent is free to play with her mind even further, challenging God’s promise that if Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they will die. Genesis 3:4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.”

This promise empowers Eve to expand her thoughts into action. She takes a bite of the fruit of knowledge.

Her fallibility to this manipulation by the serpent is discovered, however. Genesis 3:13 “Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

From there, God takes action, punishing the serpent and banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Christians refer to these events simply as The Fall, which symbolize the weakness of human nature and the human propensity for destroying that which is perfect and holy.

Is original sin still in effect?

Given the supposed permanent effects of Original Sin, it is somewhat surprising that many Christians seem to have developed the rather humanistic belief that the reach and impact of human sin has somehow gotten weaker over time. This is particularly evident in the current debates over climate change and global warming, where many Christian conservatives side with Republican political conservatives, insisting that the world is simply too big for human beings to affect it with their actions.

What a surprise this would be to God…if we were given an audience to make that claim!

Don’t worry God! We’ve got everything under control! Nothing we are doing is causing creation any harm! Just go back where you came from, up in heaven or whatever! We’ll call you if we see any real problems.

The arrogance of people who say that global warming isn’t possible because mankind is simply not capable of affecting something so big as the earth directly denies the biblical account of the Fall of Man and Original Sin.

We know from Genesis that the Lord engages Adam and Eve directly, telling them they have literally ruined the Garden of Eden with their actions. Then he casts them out and puts flaming swords up to guard the entrance. See ya later, kids. Have fun in the real world. Now you’ll have to toil for your food, and women will groan in childbirth.

And the serpent? His kind is sentenced to crawling on their belly for eternity.

A coalition of denial

So it is somewhat shocking to hear biblical literalists, fundamentalists and creationists band together to deny climate change and the science behind it. The reason why this collective of bible-thumping believers is so adamant has much to do with a denial of science in general, especially evolutionary science, which they accuse of all sorts of malfeasance, but especially contradiction of the literal creation account as shown in Genesis.

Well, let’s put that aside for a moment and give consideration to something that will make sense to biblical literalists and creationists. It starts like this: If human beings caused original sin and a fallen world, why are they not just as capable of harming the planet at a level that would produce global climate change? It doesn’t make scriptural sense to not connect the two.

One one hand biblical literalists claim that human beings are responsible for all sorts of corruption and evil in the world. But when it comes to pointing out a specific result of those actions, such as anthropgenic (human-caused) climate change, creationists and their ilk run for cover like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, hoping like hell God won’t find out what they’ve been supporting.

It’s just as bad denying human sin today as it was eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge back in the so-called Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve ran and hid because they didn’t want to accept responsibility or face the consequences for their actions. It was more convenient, they thought, to escape into their pre-imagined world of naive innocence than to accept that they had failed God by listening to someone who twisted God’s words to make them think they were more special than they were.

The serpent of unregulated exploitation

The same dynamic is occurring today. Savvy politicians and industry leaders have crawled up to conservative Christianity like a serpent, whispering in the ear of latter-day Adam and Eve who cling to a literal brand of faith, just as did the original Adam and Eve.

Today’s serpent of exploitation make promises that siding with industry is the right thing to do, insisting that they too are on the side of God because after all, didn’t God promise human beings a right to “dominion” over the earth? Oooh, they are crafty, aren’t they?

We should recall that this is the same sort of manipulative argument the serpent makes to Eve. First the serpent tries tricking her into thinking she is as smart as God, then uses compliments and half-true statements (“You will not surely die…) to win her over completely. Eve is easily taken in by the power and promise of what the serpent has to tell her.

The power of denial

Climate change deniers from and industrial and economic standpoint want to avoid the difficulty of living by rules that restrict their activities, and may indeed cut into their profits. But all those claims are unproven, actually. Their arguments and the atmosphere of fear they create in society are sufficient enough to cause doubt in the minds of millions of people clinging to a fixed worldview that says God is in complete control of the earth. And why would God let things go wrong?

Yet there is the serpent of exploitation whispering into the ear of modern day Adam and Eve, “Nothing you can do will affect the earth. God has given you dominion over it.”

The serpent preys on the desires of people whose comprehension of the need for self-limits and discipline is overwhelmed by their desire for material security and alliance with powerful interests here on earth. Adam and Eve were greedy then. And they’re blindly greedy now. They conspire with Satan to deny global climate change is possible. “You will not surely die…” whispers the serpent.

Let us speak plainly: Climate change and global warming caused by human beings can be directly interpreted as the product of a sinful and fallen world. Our ravenous consumption of resources has been like raping the Garden of Eden not just of its fruits, but of every green thing we can lay our eyes on.

We’ve dug into the earth and extracted a form of fuel that pumps out excessive amounts of natural compounds that normally exist in a natural balance in our atmosphere. But when that atmosphere is overloaded with those same gasses by the activities of man, even God’s creation can’t handle it. Then we get climate change. Global warming. And if we don’t do something about our abusive ways, all hell may break loose. Even an apocalypse is possible. Here comes Revelation. Don’t get Left Behind.

Equally chilling prospects

It could easily switch and go the other way, too. Some aspect of the climate may snap and send us into an Ice Age just as well. But to deny the fact that the activities of human beings have an effect on the climate of the earth is at this point both scientifically and biblically unsound.

Currently there exists a direct correlation between Christian believers and creationists who deny global warming. But they are denying the very fact of human sin in doing so. Apparently these deniers like to think they are smarter than those humanistic scientists claiming there is all sorts of evidence and data supporting the notion of anthropogenic climate change. Some deniers go so far as to say they aren’t worried about climate change because Jesus is coming soon. He won’t like what he sees if he does.

All we need is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure–Mark Twain

This so-called Christian confidence comes from a belief that the Bible knows more about creation than do scientists. But as Genesis shows, human hubris makes people susceptible to corruptions of the very faith and wisdom they hold dear. All it takes for human beings to go astray is a gentle appeal to their desires and their vanity. In our case, American politicians have been smart enough, like Satan himself, to craftily link our currently unsustainable industrial lifestyle to the biblical notion of human dominion over the earth.

It is a crafty move indeed. But it explains why so many fundamental Christians and creationists are so adamant in their contentions that God is on their side. To admit differently is to confess being a party of Satan himself. But that is exactly what has happened. The question is whether today’s Adam and Eve can see through the ruse of their own self-deception. The world’s future may depend on their repentance.