Bush Derangement Syndrome

There is an incredible statistic contained in the latest Fox News Opinion/Dynamics Poll. When asked (question #10) whether or not the respondent wished the president to succeed, 51% of Democrats answered "no" and 9% weren't sure. This is truly astonishing.

By implication at least 51% of Democrats want the president to fail with his management of the economy, with social security reform, with the war in Iraq, and in the war on terror. Fifty-one percent of Democrats, evidently, would rather see this country mired in abject economic misery, see Iraq spiral into total chaos, and have terrorists committing mass murder in our cities than have President Bush succeed in preventing these calamities.

These people, the majority of Democrats, are either terribly deranged or so unimaginably stupid that they didn't understand the full significance of their response to this question.

More on Rev. Boyd

An article by Mark Tooley appears in the Weekly Standard about pastor Greg Boyd, author of The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, and pastor of 4000 member Woodland Hills Church in suburban St. Paul.

We took a look at the controversy surrounding Pastor Boyd at the end of last month, but the Standard article introduces a couple of additional items that place Rev. Boyd's credibility in question. Mr. Tooley writes that:

Boyd is blunt in his critique of America. "Our country was founded pretty much as most nations were founded--thru barbaric violence," he recently told a radio interviewer. "It was a conquering kind and 10 to 20 million Native Americans were killed [which was followed by] the enslavement of African Americans."

Now I don't know how many Native Americans were killed by European colonists and later by Americans, but I'm quite sure it wasn't even close to 10 million. Wikipedia puts the figure of Native Americans killed by whites at around 16,000 (A similar number of whites were killed by Native Americans). It's simply irresponsible for Boyd to just throw around numbers like the ones he uses in order to tarnish the reputations of our predecessors when he has no idea what the actual figures are.

Tooley also notes that:

In Myth of a Christian Nation, [Boyd] says that the "horrendous" abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib led to the Iraqi terrorist beheading of John [sic] Berg. "You can begin to understand why, given our passionate convictions and given their passionate convictions, this bloody tit-for-tat game is almost inevitable," he writes, attributing both passions to "tribal" loyalties.

This is of course ridiculous. Firstly, the man's name was Nicholas, not John. Secondly, despite what Zarqawi said, to believe that he beheaded Berg because of the abuses of Abu Ghraib is risible. Zarqawi beheaded a lot of people who weren't even Americans. What was their connection to Abu Ghraib? Abu Ghraib was just an excuse for him to do what he wanted to do and would have done anyway. Thirdly, to implicitly equate humiliating treatment of terrorist suspects at Abu Ghraib with the butchering of an innocent man, as Boyd does, calling them tit-for-tat, is moral imbecility.

Greg Boyd may be a very effective preacher, but he should take his own advice and keep his politics out of his ministry. He'd save himself a lot of embarrassment.