Here's a wish for a WILDLY HAPPY 27th BIRTHDAY for BugGirl416 ! 

And a moderately Happy Easter to the rest of you. 

 

The New York Times

April 9, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

Christ Among the Partisans

By GARRY WILLS

Chicago

THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here." (John 18:36)  Jesus brought no political message or program.

This is a truth that needs emphasis at a time when some Democrats, fearing that the Republicans have advanced over them by the use of religion, want to respond with a claim that Jesus is really on their side. He is not.  He avoided those who would trap him into taking sides for or against the Roman occupation of Judea. He paid his taxes to the occupying power but said only, "Let Caesar have what belongs to him, and let God have what belongs to him." (Matthew 22:21)  He was the original proponent of a separation of church and state.

Those who want the state to engage in public worship,or even to have prayer in schools, are defying his injunction: "When you pray, be not like the pretenders, who prefer to pray in the synagogues and in the public square, in the sight of others. In truth I tell you, that is all the profit they will have. But you, when you pray, go into your inner chamber and, locking the door, pray there in hiding to your Father,and your Father who sees you in hiding will reward you." (Matthew 6:5-6)  He shocked people by his repeated violation of the external holiness code of

his time, emphasizing that his religion was an internal matter of the heart.

But doesn't Jesus say to care for the poor?  Repeatedly and insistently, but what he says goes far beyond

politics and is of a different order. He declares that only one test will determine who will come into his

reign: whether one has treated the poor, the hungry, the homeless and the imprisoned as one would Jesus

himself. "Whenever you did these things to the lowliest of my brothers, you were doing it to me." (Matthew 25:40)  No government can propose that as its program. Theocracy itself never went so far, nor could it.

The state cannot indulge in self-sacrifice. If it is to treat the poor well, it must do so on grounds of justice (I would add here, "or enlightened self-interest"  Eccentrique), appealing to arguments that will convince people who are not followers of Jesus or of any other religion. The norms of justice will fall short of the demands of love that Jesus imposes. A Christian may adopt just political measures from his or her own motive of love, but that is not the argument that will define justice for state purposes.

To claim that the state's burden of justice, which falls short of the supreme test Jesus imposes, is actually what he wills — that would be to substitute some lesser and false religion for what Jesus brought from the Father. Of course, Christians who do not meet the lower standard of state justice to the poor will, a fortiori, fail to pass the higher test.  (Emphasis mine.  Eccentrique)

The Romans did not believe Jesus when he said he had no political ambitions. That is why the soldiers mocked him as a failed king, giving him a robe and scepter and bowing in fake obedience (John 19:1-3). Those who today say that they are creating or following a "Christian politics" continue the work of those soldiers, disregarding the words of Jesus that his reign is not of this order.

Some people want to display and honor the Ten Commandments as a political commitment enjoined by the

religion of Jesus. That very act is a violation of the First and Second Commandments. By erecting a false

religion — imposing a reign of Jesus in this order — they are worshiping a false god. They commit idolatry.

They also take the Lord's name in vain.

Some may think that removing Jesus from politics would mean removing morality from politics. They think we

would all be better off if we took up the slogan "What would Jesus do?"

That is not a question his disciples ask in the Gospels. (I'm not convinced that those of us who are Christians should therefore never ask it.  Eccentrique)  They never knew what Jesus was going to do next. He could round on Peter and call him "Satan." He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not a great ethical teacher like Socrates, our leading humanitarian. He is an apocalyptic figure who steps outside the boundaries of normal morality to signal that the Father's judgment is breaking into history. His miracles were not acts of charity but eschatological signs — accepting the unclean, promising heavenly rewards, making last things first.

He is more a higher Nietzsche, beyond good and evil, than a higher Socrates. No politician is going to tell the lustful that they must pluck out their right eye. We cannot do what Jesus would do because we are not divine.  (I partly disagree here.  Eccentrique)

It was blasphemous to say, as the deputy under secretary of defense, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, repeatedly did, that God made George Bush president in 2000, when a majority of Americans did not vote for him. It would not remove the blasphemy for Democrats to imply that God wants Bush not to be president. Jesus should not be recruited as a campaign aide. To trivialize the mystery of Jesus is not to serve the Gospels.

The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them,

make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.

It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.

Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: "Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah." (Matthew 23:8-10)

If Democrats want to fight Republicans for the support of an institutional Jesus, they will have to give up the person who said those words. They will have to turn away from what Flannery O'Connor described as "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus" and "a wild ragged figure" who flits "from tree to tree in the back" of the mind.

He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed (sic; the writer meant to say "deemed"  Eccentrique) — respectable. At various times in the Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil's agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.

The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats.

Garry Wills is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently,

of "What Jesus Meant."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

...from the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=15632

Al Franken and Ann Coulter debated in L.A. on 2006-03-27.

At a
private dinner party before the debate, Ann Coulter quipped,
"I don't
remember the last time I saw that many angry Mexicans.
Now I know why my
towels were a little late coming up to my hotel
room."
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=15632

Here's
an email making the rounds - allegedly a transcript of
Al Franken's opening
statement.

===

Opening Statement by Al Franken

Thank you.
First of all, I know I join Ann in thanking the University of
Judaism for
hosting this event. We've had an opportunity to spend some time
with
President Wexler and have dinner with many folks from the
University
community.

And I'd like to answer the question that I
actually get asked the most when
I do an event for a Jewish organization.
Yes, I had enough to eat.

You know, in these kinds of debate forums,
someone has to go first. It's
always preferable to go second, because you can
react to what's been said,
giving you something of a tactical advantage. More
importantly, it pretty
much spares you the chore of writing out pre-prepared
remarks.

Both Ann and I said we preferred going second, but I didn't
insist on it,
because I understood somebody had to go first. And being a
liberal, I just
wasn't tough-minded enough to insist on a coin
toss.

So, I'll try to use my time to define the terms of the debate - if
you will.

"Whence Judaism?"

No. I think we should talk about the
Bush Administration and the Republican
Congress and what it has accomplished
over the past five years. I'm talking,
of course, about well over two
trillion dollars added to the national debt,
the increase in poverty in our
country and the added millions of Americans,
including children, without
health insurance. I'm talking about the sale of
our democracy to corporate
interests that pollute our water and our air. I'm
talking about the widening
gap between the haves and the have nots in this
country. And I'm talking
about the war in Iraq.

I'm talking about an increasingly corrupt,
secretive, and incompetent
federal government that rewards cronies, a
Republican majority in Congress
that's acted as a rubber stamp, that has
performed virtually no oversight
and which excludes the minority party from
the legislative process in a way
unprecedented in our recent
history.

I also want to discuss with Ann the coarsening of dialogue in
this country.
I want to discuss values with Ann. Values like love, of family,
of your
fellow man, of country. Ann has said repeatedly that liberals hate
America.
I disagree.

Last year I had the honor of speaking at West
Point. It was an audience not
so very different from this one. Except that
instead of you, the audience
was made up of about twelve hundred cadets. Many
of whom will be going to
Iraq in the next year or so.

The occasion was
the Sol Feinstone Lecture on the Meaning of Freedom endowed
by philanthropist
Sol Feinstone. It's an annual event and Sol Feinstein's
granddaughter, who is
about my age, attended.

After telling a number jokes and getting the
cadets on my side. I told them
that we had been lied into the war in Iraq. I
had just published a book
entitled The Truth (with jokes), and I told the
cadets that you can't have
freedom without the truth. You can have freedom
without jokes, as has been
proven by the Dutch and the Swiss.

I
proceeded to prove that we had been lied into war, citing example
after
example of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense
Secretary
Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice, who had been National Security Advisor in
the
lead-up to the war, telling the public information that they knew not to
be
true.

At the end of the speech I received a standing ovation from
the cadets. Sol
Feinstone's granddaughter told me she had gone to every
lecture for the last
thirty or so years, and that I received only the second
standing ovation.
The other was for Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an
arm in Vietnam.

By the way, Ann has written that Max Cleland was lucky to
have lost his legs
and his arm in Vietnam. I disagree. More importantly, I
know Max, and he
disagrees.

I believe I received the standing ovation
because the cadets knew that I was
speaking from the heart, and that the
information I had given them was all
true. And as I said, you can't have
freedom without the truth.

You can't have good government without the
truth. During the crafting and
passage of the Medicare prescription drug
bill, the chief actuary of
Medicare was told to withhold from Congress the
true cost of the bill. He'd
be fired if he told the truth.

The bill
costs so much, in large part, because the bill prohibits Medicare
from
negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies on the price of drugs. As
a
result, seniors now pay on average 44% more than veterans getting the
same
drugs through the VA which is allowed to use its size to negotiate with
the
drug companies. To get the bill passed, the vote was held open for
three
hours. Tom DeLay was later admonished by Republicans on the ethics
committee
for attempting to bribe, and then extort, Republican Nick Smith of
Michigan
to get him to change his vote. The chairman of the Commerce
Committee Billy
Tauzin who ushered the legislation through, soon left
Congress for a two
million dollar a year job as the chief lobbyist for the
pharmaceutical
industry. Obviously, a complete coincidence.

During the
2000 campaign George Bush ran for president by saying repeatedly,
and I
quote, "by far the vast majority of my tax cut goes to those at the
bottom."
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the
president continues to ask for and sign tax cuts that go
primarily to those
at the top. By the way, until George W. Bush, our country
had never cut taxes
during a time of war.

As a result, our deficits grow and the cuts - in
Medicaid, Pell Grants, food
stamps, low-income housing subsidies, community
block grants - are targeted
at the poorest in our society.

George W.
Bush famously said that Jesus was his favorite political
philosopher.
Frankly, I don't get it.

I'm Jewish. Thank you. I'm not an expert on the
New Testament. But I know
that if you cut out all the passages where Jesus
talks about helping the
poor, helping the least among us, if you literally
took a pair of scissors
and cut out all those passages, you'd have the
perfect box to smuggle Rush
Limbaugh's drugs in.

I don't understand
when the Christian right says that equal rights in
marriage threatens
marriage. I've been married 30 years, many of them happy.

I don't think
that if my wife and I were walking around in Boston, where we
met, if we saw
two men holding hands with wedding bands, I don't think I'd
say "Hey, that
looks good. Y'know, honey, you don't like watching football
on Sundays. Maybe
I could marry a guy, watch football with him, and then if
I wanted to have
sex, I could come over and have sex with you."

I was just talking to Newt
Gingrich the other day. And I said to him, "Don't
you want for a gay couple
what you had with your first wife? Don't you want
that bond that comes with
the pledge of fidelity that you had with your
second wife? Don't you want
what comes with that lifelong bond that you may
or may not have with your
third wife - I have no idea what's going on
there."

You know, Bill
O'Reilly always talks about his "traditional values" - as
opposed to "the far
left's secular humanist values." I didn't realize phone
sex was a traditional
value. I didn't think the phone had been around long
enough. Maybe telegraph
sex.

In her book Slander, Ann referred to Democrats and our "Marquis de
Sade
lifestyle." I've been married for thirty years. Ann, you're an
attractive
woman. And I know you support the president's abstinence-only sex
education.

I want to congratulate you for saving yourself for your one
true love.

When my daughter was six years old, her teacher asked all her
students to
write about how their parents had met. We told Thomasin that we
met at a
mixer freshman year of college. I saw Franni across the room,
gathering up
some friends to leave. I liked the way she was taking control
and I thought
she was beautiful. So I asked her to dance, and then got her a
ginger ale,
then escorted her to her dorm and asked for a date.

My
daughter wrote, "My dad asked my mom to dance, bought her a drink, and
then
took her home." Now all the facts were accurate, but what my daughter
wrote
was extremely misleading. Now my daughter wasn't lying. She didn't
realize
that what she wrote made her mom seem like a slut.

Ann, however, is not
six years old. And she has developed her own techniques
for misleading, by
leaving out important facts. Let me give you an example
of Ann lying by
omission.

Also in her book Slander, Ann tells her readers that Al Gore
had a leg up on
George W. Bush when applying to their respective colleges.
Harvard and Yale.

Ann writes:

"Oddly, it was Bush who was
routinely accused of having sailed through life
on his father's name. But the
truth was the reverse. The media was
manipulating the fact that - many years
later - Bush's father became
president. When Bush was admitted to Yale, his
father was a little-known
congressman on the verge of losing his first Senate
race. His father was a
Yale alumnus, but so were a lot of other boys'
parents. It was Gore, not
Bush, who had a famous father likely to impress
college admissions
committees."

What does Ann omit? Well, that Bush's
grandfather Prescott Bush was also a
Yale alum and had been Senator from
Connecticut, the home state of Yale
University. That Prescott Bush had been a
trustee of Yale. That Prescott
Bush had been the first chair of Yale's
Development Board - the folks who
raise the money. That Prescott Bush sat on
the Yale Corporation for twelve
years. That Prescott Bush, like George W.
Bush's father, George H. W, Bush,
had been a member of Skull and Bones. That
the first Bush to go to Yale was
Bush's great great grandfather James Bush,
who graduated in 1844. That in
addition to his father, grandfather, and
greatgreatgrandfather, Bush was the
legacy of no less than twenty-seven other
relatives who preceded him at
Yale, including five great great uncles. Seven
great uncles. Five uncles,
and a number of first cousins.

Now why did
Ann leave out these somewhat relevant facts? Ann grew up in
Connecticut. Ann,
did you really not know that Prescott Bush had been your
senator when you
were born?

Ann, is it possible that when Prescott's son George H. W. Bush
became
president, it totally escaped your notice that his father had
represented
your state in the United States Senate? Did neither of your
parents mention
it in passing at the dinner table? Did no one at home in
Darien make any
comments about the new president's
lineage?

Understand. This isn't sloppiness. This is deliberate. For Ann's
purposes -
to claim that the media that was manipulating facts here - Ann
herself had
to manipulate facts - in such a shameless way. This is what she
does.

And she does it over and over and over again.

Let me give
you another example.

On page 265 of her book Treason, Ann writes of Tom
Friedman, the New York
Times columnist. "He blamed twenty years of relentless
attacks by Muslim
extremists on- I quote - 'religious fundamentalists of any
stripe.'"

This didn't sound like Tom Friedman to me, so I found the one
Friedman
column that contained that phrase - "religious fundamentalists of
any
stripe." It was from a December 26, 2001 column called "Naked Air," about
an
airline where everyone would fly naked. "Think about it," Friedman
writes,
tongue firmly planted in cheek, "If everybody flew naked, not only
would you
never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box
cutters or
exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe
would ever
be caught dead flying nude."

Let me repeat. Ann wrote of
Tom Friedman, Jewish by the way, that "he blamed
twenty years of relentless
attacks by Muslim extremists on - I quote -
'religious fundamentalists of any
stripe.'" She bothered to put "I quote" in
there for
emphasis.

Friedman actually wrote "no religious fundamentalists of any
stripe would
ever be caught dead flying nude" in service of a conceit that
illustrated
our dilemma of either becoming less open as a society or learning
to live
with much higher risks than we've ever been used to
before.

Friedman was not blaming 9/11 on the Lubavichers, as Ann
suggests.

Now this sort of deliberate misrepresentation contributes to a
coarsening of
our nation's dialogue. Ann recently told an
audience:

"We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens'
creme brulee,"
Coulter said. "That's just a joke, for you in the
media."

Here's my question. What's the joke? Maybe it's a prejudice from
my days as
a comedy writer, but I always thought the joke had to have an
operative
funny idea. I'll give you an example of a joke.

Like they do
every Saturday night, two elderly Jewish couples are going out
to dinner. The
guys are in front, the girls riding in back. Irv says to Sid,

"Where
should we go tonight?"

Sid says, "How about that place we went about a
month ago. The Italian place
with the great lasagna."

Irv says, "I
don't remember it."

Sid says, "The place with the great
lasagna."

Irv says, "I don't remember. What's the name of the
place?"

Sid thinks. But can't remember. "A flower. Gimme a
flower."

"Tulip?" Irv says.

"No, no. A different
flower."

"Magnolia?"

"No, no. A basic
flower."

"Orchid?"

"No! Basic."

"Rose?"

That's it!
Sid turns to the back seat. "Rose. What was the name of
that
restaurant.?"

That's a joke. What exactly is the joke in "We need
somebody to put rat
poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee?" Is it the
crme brulee? Is that
it? Because Stevens is some kind of Francophile or
elitist? Is it the rat
poison? See, I would have gone with Drano. I'm really
trying here, Ann.
Please, when you come up, explain the joke about murdering
an associate
justice of the Supreme Court. One who by the way, was appointed
to the
Supreme Court by Gerald Ford, and who, also, by the way, won a Bronze
Star
serving in the Navy in World War II. What is the joke? 'Cause I don't
get
it.

Now in Ann's defense, she doesn't always make horribly
offensive remarks or
knowingly craft lies. Very often Ann is just wrong out
of ignorance or pure
laziness. Take this from the MSNBC Show - Saturday Final
- on August 30,
2003 - MSNBC. She is talking about how well the war in Iraq
is going.

COULTER: I think the rebuilding is going extremely well.
Douglas MacArthur
was in Japan five years after V.J. Day. There were enormous
casualties in
Germany after World War II. The rebuilding is actually going
quite well
compared to past efforts. And really, all we're getting from
Democrats is
constant carping.

Ann, do you know how many combat
fatalities the American military had in
Germany after V-E day? Zero. You know
how many in Japan after V-J day? Zero.

Ann and I have debated once
before. In May of 2004, and Ann still felt the
war was going amazingly well.
Let me quote her from that debate:

".. This war is going amazingly well.
the casualty rate is incredibly small
for the rebuilding. It is going better
than can be expected. You cannot read

about how well things are going
against Al Sadr, where you have Iraqis
protesting against Al Sadr; all these
stories about how Al Sadr had (this)
vast support among the Iraquis. oh no no
no. They recently held a protest
march saying, 'Al Sadr, get out.'"

As
you know, Ann, Moktadr al Sadr, recently picked the Shiite choice for
prime
minister for the new government, Mohamed al Jafaari. Sadr has
thirty-two
seats in the Iraqi assembly compared to Ahmed Chalabi's zero. And
remember,
it was Chalabi to whom we were going to turn over the
Iraqi
government.

Things are not going amazingly well in Iraq. And
they haven't been going
amazingly well since we allowed the looting of
Baghdad. A week ago, former
prime minister Ayad Allawi said that Iraq was
already in a civil war. And as
George Bush said in September of 2004, we
should listen to Allawi because -
and I quote - "he understands what's going
on there - after all, he lives
there."

The first thing this
Administration needs to do in Iraq is to start
acknowledging the truth and
level with the American people.

I think the one lesson we can all agree
on from Vietnam is that we cannot
blame the troops. By and large, the vast,
vast majority of our troops have
performed heroically. And they deserve our
gratitude and support. And that
means supporting them after they've come
home.

Two thirds of the wounded in Iraq now have brain injuries. That's
because so
many of the casualties are from IED's, and the injuries are
concussive and
not ballistic. Each one of those brain injuries is going to
cost a million
dollars over the course of that veteran's life. And we need to
fund programs
for those who come back with post traumatic stress disorder - a
higher
percentage than in any previous war.

Now another value I
believe in is love of country. For some reason it
rankles Ann that I've done
six USO tours and have had the nerve to talk
about it. I do so because I want
people to be aware of the work that the USO
does. I want anyone here today
who is a Hollywood celebrity to think about
giving up a couple weeks of your
life to entertain our men and women in
uniform. I think it rankles Ann that
I've talked about going on the USO
tours because she can't conceive that
anyone would actually do something for
anyone else. I didn't go to Iraq to
prove that Democrats are patriotic, Ann.

I did my first USO tour in 1999,
when Clinton was president. We went to
Kosovo, a war that was vehemently and
vocally opposed by many Republicans.
Even so, we didn't call them traitors. I
was invited by the USO to go to
Iraq because they know I do a good job and
that it means a lot to the troops
when anyone comes over to show them we
care.

My daughter is 25. She teaches inner city kids in the Bronx. And
that makes
me proud. She hates when I say it, and that makes me even more
proud.

My son is an engineering student. He wants to build fuel efficient
cars.
He's a junior in college and got a job at Ford this summer working on a
new
manufacturing process for power trans. I don't know what that means
either.
But he got there because he works his butt off.

But my son
doesn't feel that he got where he is because he is some kind of
rugged
individual. That he did it all himself. He knows that he stands on
the
shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on
the
shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on
the
necks of Indians.

My wife and I tried to instill certain values in
our kids. But we don't love
them because they're perfect. We love them
because they're decent, loving
kids. Kids who care about others and care, by
the way, about the truth.

One last thing. Speaking of the truth. A few
months after my last debate
with Ann, the following appeared in a New York
Observer story about Ann.

>From the September 13, 2004
issue..

The writer asks Ann in the article:

"She debated Al
Franken recently?

"'Yes,' she said. 'It's not an interesting debate,
because liberals can't
argue. So it's never like point-counterpoint; all we
do is hear about his
fucking U.S.O. tours for three hours. Excuse my
French.'"

Ann, let's see if we can have a point-counterpoint, and an
interesting
debate. And by the way, Ann, I have here a DVD of that entire
three hour
debate - And I'll bet you my speaking fee tonight that I spoke
about my USO
tours for less than a grand total of three minutes. How about it
Ann? My
speaking fee against your speaking fee?

I mean we care about
the truth, don't we?

Article Launched: 3/26/2006 12:06 AM

'Unit's' military expert has fighting words for Bush

By David Kronke, TV Critic

U-Entertainment

Eric Haney, a retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army,

was a founding member of Delta Force, the military's elite

covert counter-terrorist unit. He culled his experiences for

"Inside Delta Force" (Delta; $14), a memoir rich with

harrowing stories, though in an interview, Haney declines with

a shrug to estimate the number of times he was almost killed.

(Perhaps the most high-profile incident that almost claimed

his life was the 1980 failed rescue of the hostages in Iran.)

Today, he's doing nothing nearly as dangerous: He serves as an

executive producer and technical adviser for "The Unit," CBS'

new hit drama based on his book, developed by playwright David

Mamet. Even up against "American Idol," "The Unit" shows

muscle, drawing 18 million viewers in its first two airings.

Since he has devoted his life to protecting his country in

some of the world's most dangerous hot spots, you might assume

Haney is sympathetic to the Bush administration's current

plight in Iraq (the laudatory cover blurb on his book comes

from none other than Fox's News' Bill O'Reilly). But he's also

someone with close ties to the Pentagon, so he's privy to

information denied the rest of us.

We recently spoke to Haney, an amiable, soft-spoken Southern

gentleman, on the set of "The Unit."

Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?

A: Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The

reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for

taking this nation to war were not what they stated. (Army

Gen.) Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and ... pursued warfare

that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's

why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell

him what was going to happen afterward.

We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented

internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the

Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world

war, all for their own personal policies.

Q: What is the cost to our country?

A: For the first thing, our credibility is utterly zero. So we

destroyed whatever credibility we had. ... And I say "we,"

because the American public went along with this. They voted

for a second Bush administration out of fear, so fear is what

they're going to have from now on.

Our military is completely consumed, so were there a real

threat - thankfully, there is no real threat to the U.S. in

the world, but were there one, we couldn't confront it. Right

now, that may not be a bad thing, because that keeps Bush from

trying something with Iran or with Venezuela.

The harm that has been done is irreparable. There are more

than 2,000 American kids that have been killed. Tens of

thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed - which no one

in the U.S. really cares about those people, do they? I never

hear anybody lament that fact. It has been a horror, and this

administration has worked overtime to divert the American

public's attention from it. Their lies are coming home to

roost now, and it's gonna fall apart. But somebody's gonna

have to clear up the aftermath and the harm that it's done

just to what America stands for. It may be two or three

generations in repairing.

Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney ...

A: (Interrupting) That's Cheney's pursuit. The only reason

anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about

vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You

don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows

that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does.

I've argued this on Bill O'Reilly and other Fox News shows. I

ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want

someone that the American public pays to torture? He's an

employee of yours. It's worse than ridiculous. It's criminal;

it's utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of

diverting attention away from real issues and debating the

silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of

helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I'm

saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most

pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know

it. You don't do it. It's an act of cowardice. I hear

apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is

a ludicrous argument. ... The Saddam Husseins of the world are

not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution

saying what's legal and what we believed in. Now we're going

to throw it away.

Q: As someone who repeatedly put your life on the line, did

some of the most hair-raising things to protect your country,

and to see your country behave this way, that must be ...

A: It's pretty galling. But ultimately I believe in the good

and the decency of the American people, and they're starting

to see what's happening and the lies that have been told.

We're seeing this current house of cards start to flutter

away. The American people come around. They always do.

THE UNIT

What: Action-adventure about special-ops unit.

Where: CBS (Channel 2).

When: 9 p.m. Tuesdays.

---

David Kronke (818) 713-3638 david.kronke@dailynews.com

**********

**********