TV B-Gone Again

Thursday.

Caught up with Raul Duberly and Merl Kapram last night. They were chewing the fat at the bar in The Hole in the Ground. Raul has ordered a Tv B-Gone. Can't wait for it to arrive - December promises to be a quiet time in the watering holes around here!

Glad to report that the piddling Bag Lady has not been spotted so far this week. I hope she's not been locked up on public decency charges. After all "when you've gotta go - you've gotta go". There are plenty of worse offences being committed every day. She should become a fundamentalist convert.

Speaking of which, takes me to a report on MSNBC. "Southern Baptist television evangelist James Robison related that in a telephone call in 1999, Bush told him, "I feel like God wants me to run for president." The same year, said Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush told religious leaders at a meeting, "I've heard the call. I believe God wants me to be president."

Here we go again - "I feel" and "I believe". At least he didn't go the whole hog there. There is just a suggestion there that he accepted he might have misunderstood the message.

In June 2003, Mahmoud Abbas, then the Palestinian prime minister, said that in a conversation with Bush, the president told him: "God told me to strike at al-Qaida, and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." Yup, you surely did. It's unsettling to note that it's now "God told" and "He instructed".

The article goes on to point out that "Democrats and other Americans surprised by how strongly Bush's near-fundamentalist beliefs guide his governance can't say they weren't warned. Throughout the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush expansively talked about his faith and how it had rescued him from a squandered life of alcohol and failed business ventures."

George - there's a whole heap of us who wish you had just stuck to what you were good at.