Talk about being left speechless. I just checked out the formerly classified cover sheets to briefings produced by Rumsfeld's Pentagon during the early days of the Iraq War. It's hard to count the ways in which they are offensive. Long story short, they show American soldiers in Iraq, and the photos are adorned with Bible verses. ("Nobiscum deus"? "Gott mit Uns," anyone?) So much for the argument that more torture photos would inflame Muslim passion. Nothing like a Muslim-killing Crusade to do an even better job of it.
Check it out, for the love of Pete. (But fair warning: you may need a bucket if you're a person of any sort of Christian persuasion short of hardcore fundamentalist, or if you're a person who reads that whole business about not having a state religion in the Constitution and believes it.)
Where can you even begin? Who knew the river they were crossing en route to Baghdad was actually the River Hubris? The hubris reaches its flood stage, for me, with the photo of tanks driving through a gate, the image adorned with: "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps faith. Isaiah 26:2."
How dumb are these people? The "righteous nation" means Israel. You have to smoke some pretty high test fundamentalist hash to think the God of the Old Testament actually meant America was the object of His special favor instead of Israel. Especially in light of our not existing as a nation then, give a take a couple of millennia.
We're also, besides manifestly not being Israel, a nation that used to pride itself on not having a state religion. When your military briefings come with cover sheets that make Iraq look like Bible Camp with machine guns, you've got many layers of problem. I don't know if George W. Bush will eventually be ranked by historians as the worst president in our history or merely as one of the worst, but I think it's a pretty sure bet he'll be declared our only medieval president.
I suspect the next several years will reveal more and more of just how bad things really were in the Bush administration. Just when you think it can't get any worse…
