Friday, September 29, 2006
His "yea" earns my "nay"
With disappointment & sadness, I have concluded that I cannot vote for Sen. Bob Menendez in November. Of course, I will not vote for his Republican opponent.
I had a terrible dream last night. Not about S. 3930 or Sgt. Howard or national politics. But it was a narrative & not entirely irrational dream, & in it, a pet lamb that I had been charged with protecting was butchered & roasted on a backyard grill by a family I'd invited over. A barbecue party from hell. It was a fascinating dream, but I was not amused by it as I am by some of my dreamtime encounters with scary, demonic characters.
Over in the bloglist on the right there are websites with names like Street Prophets, Sojourners, The Revealer, Preemptive Karma, Talk to Action, Public Christian. There's more in my browser bookmarks. I am not a religious person, but I visit these religion-oriented websites because I have to remind myself on a daily basis that many matters involve morality in ways that transcend American politics; that often it's about humanity, or sentient life itself. There are moments when I do not have, nor do I even want to consider, the flexible ethics & rationales of political partisans
I know history; struggles & movements seen in context,over years, decades & centuries, through eras of progression & regression. I was raised in a religious tradition that says emphatically: The lamb dies now but it wins anyway. That hardly diminishes the horror of witnessing the slaughter. The President keeps repeating the mantra that our enemies "hate everything America stands for." But what happens when we, because of fear or political expediency, no longer stand for what we supposedly stand for?
I had a terrible dream last night. Not about S. 3930 or Sgt. Howard or national politics. But it was a narrative & not entirely irrational dream, & in it, a pet lamb that I had been charged with protecting was butchered & roasted on a backyard grill by a family I'd invited over. A barbecue party from hell. It was a fascinating dream, but I was not amused by it as I am by some of my dreamtime encounters with scary, demonic characters.
Over in the bloglist on the right there are websites with names like Street Prophets, Sojourners, The Revealer, Preemptive Karma, Talk to Action, Public Christian. There's more in my browser bookmarks. I am not a religious person, but I visit these religion-oriented websites because I have to remind myself on a daily basis that many matters involve morality in ways that transcend American politics; that often it's about humanity, or sentient life itself. There are moments when I do not have, nor do I even want to consider, the flexible ethics & rationales of political partisans
I know history; struggles & movements seen in context,over years, decades & centuries, through eras of progression & regression. I was raised in a religious tradition that says emphatically: The lamb dies now but it wins anyway. That hardly diminishes the horror of witnessing the slaughter. The President keeps repeating the mantra that our enemies "hate everything America stands for." But what happens when we, because of fear or political expediency, no longer stand for what we supposedly stand for?
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
His vote on S. 3930 was so wrong. He claims on campaign website to be against the war, yet he supports a dangerous expansion of presidential war powers. Why? Let's assume his vote was sincerely cast, & that it wouldn't matter which party controled the Senate.
I'm with you on this one. Of course the party loyalists at Blue Jersey are still referring to Menendez as "voting with us 85% of the time", but this is no ordinary vote. This was a vote to turn Bush into Hitler, and while I could perhaps forgive him for supporting the flag burning amendment and being squishy on net neutrality, this vote was the end of the line for me. Someone this unprincipled cannot be relied upon even IF Democrats somehow manage to gain control of the Senate. Whose votes did he think he'd be gaining by doing this?
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