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Less than a week ago Sparrow Chat wrote an article, “One Heckuva Job”, accusing George W Bush of initiating events that led up to the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

At the time, the decision to go on that subject was made due to the pending resignation of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Everyone else was following that story, so Sparrow Chat chose to be different.

Little did I, or many others in Blogland, know that these two stories were inextricably linked.

One man who was aware, the investigative journalist Greg Palast, tells the full, riveting, story on his website – also available as an audio podcast – HERE*.

It really should not be missed.

^{*My thanks to “WiseWebWoman” for providing the link and additional information.}

Filed under: Bush’s failures

I’ve almost given up writing about organized religion. Regular readers are aware of my views, and I’d as well bang the wall with my head as attempt reason on American Christians.

Unfortunately, in this part of America at least, it’s very hard to get away from them. While Christians get hot and sweaty around the underwear at any suggestion they may not have the absolutely perfect answer to the post-death experience, they are more than happy to shove their beliefs down my throat every hundred yards along the highway.

I’m talking church hoardings and mile high notice boards.

With religious slogans now marketing well on the internet (any local pastor can purchase his Sunday sermon and get half a dozen Jesus slogans thrown in as a ‘This Week’s Special Offer’) the quality has sunk to a level barely worthy of notice. One or two still manage to make it out of the slime of gratuitous Godliness, but the majority are at best, a crudely pathetic play on words. Most high school kids could do a better job.

The pastor of the church en route to my local grade school generally manages to clean the gutter with his tongue when it comes to Jesus slogans. His latest offering is no exception, and must surely have fallen out of a Kellogg’s packet.

Most of us enjoy the thought of Friday as the last workday before a glorious weekend, and no doubt others besides me utilize the ‘TGIF’ motif to signify the fact.

Consequently, when the latest addition to this brain-dead pastor’s slogan-fest appeared on the hoarding I was irked, to say the least.

Not content with some staid and depressing Biblical quote designed to shrivel the faithless in their boots, he’d taken one of my favorite little acronyms and mutilated it.

“TGIF – THANK GOD I’M FORGIVEN”

Having resisted the urge to walk straight in and spit in his font, I instead began to ponder on just what it was that required such forgiveness. I applied it to myself, but for the life of me couldn’t come up with anything I’d ever done that could truly demand Divine forgiveness, certainly not sufficient to warrant some bod spending three days nailed to a cross.

Mind you, a hundred yards down the road was another church with a slogan that read: “It wasn’t nails that fastened Jesus to the cross, it was Love”, so perhaps it wasn’t so bad, after all.

I mean, Love? I guess it was more like being, well, super-glued.

If the Christian God made us all in his image, then it hardly seems fair to penalize us for not being perfect. The clerics found a somewhat convoluted explanation for this by inventing ‘original sin’, which basically means it doesn’t matter how perfect we are, we have to be forgiven because some mentally-retarded idiot ate the wrong apple somewhere in the dawn of time.

And guess what? Two hundred million Americans bought it. Talk about gullible! It’s no wonder this country’s overflowing with snake oil salesmen.

Geeez! All I can say is,TGIF – THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY.

Damn me, no it isn’t. It’s only Wednesday.

Well, God forgive me for making that mistake!

Filed under: God only knows

Everywhere you look in the media these days there are words of optimism over Iraq. “Things are getting better”, is the phrase rolling off the tongues of journalists and writers from NBC to BBC.

George W Bush looks less harassed by the minute; Tony Blair still wears his silly grin while pocketing another hundred thousand from his latest speech on spreading “faith and freedom”.

In fact, it seems the only ones not smiling and looking relieved are Amnesty International, who have just released a twenty-eight page report on the progress in Iraq, entitled, somewhat surprisingly:

“Carnage and Despair: Iraq Five Years On.”[1]

It makes interesting reading:

“Five years after the US-led invasion that toppled
Saddam Hussain, Iraq is one of the most dangerous
countries in the world. Hundreds of people are being
killed every month in the pervasive violence, while
countless lives are threatened every day by poverty,
cuts to power and water supplies, food and medical
shortages, and rising violence against women and girls.
Sectarian hatred has torn apart families and
neighbourhoods that once lived together in harmony.

Despite the heavy US and Iraqi military and police
presence, law and order remain a distant prospect.
The US-led Multinational Force (MNF) and the Iraqi
government formed from political parties that gained
from or emerged out of the 2003 invasion have failed
to institute the rule of law, uphold human rights, bring
peace and security, or end impunity.”

And that’s just the first two paragraphs.

You may like to put yourself out, take time off from browsing the latest antics of Brittany or Paris, to find out a little more accurately just what your government has done – in YOUR name – to that country.

Oh, and did I mention Amnesty International were the only one’s not smiling?

I was wrong. Iraqis aren’t smiling much, either.

^{[1] “CARNAGE AND DESPAIR: IRAQ FIVE YEARS ON”, Amnesty International, March 2008.}

Filed under: Liars’ War