near Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

The Big Boxing Croc of Humpty Doo.

CRUMMY OLD WINE DEPT: The 53rd Regiment of Foot, faux et vrai / Happy Veterans Day 2006

Click once or twice.

from "A Shropshire Lad"
(1896)
by A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman

THE DAY OF BATTLE

"Far I hear the bugle blow
To call me where I would not go,
And the guns begin the song,
'Soldier, fly or stay for long.'

"Comrade, if to turn and fly
Made a soldier never die,
Fly I would, for who would not?
'Tis sure no pleasure to be shot.

"But since the man that runs away
Lives to die another day,
And cowards' funerals, when they come,
Are not wept so well at home,

"Therefore, though the best is bad,
Stand and do the best, my lad;
Stand and fight and see your slain,
And take the bullet in your brain."

* * * * * * *

Much Selvedge on this version.

Originally posted on the Old Vleeptron on 6 February 2005 (the day after my birthday).

If Sharon Secor's reading this, I hope she'll write or Comment about her brother, who I hope came safe home from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, since making this faux postage stamp, I have discovered that there really is / was a 53rd Regiment of Foot. I thought I was fantasizing this unit, but it was no fantasy.

Its more proper title was The King's Shropshire Light Infantry, and they were first raised in 1755, were designated the 53rd in 1757, and finally incorporated within different army units in 1881.

While active, the 53rd Regiment of Foot served and fought at Fort Ticonderoga (New York) during the French and Indian War, in Canada to defend Quebec against an invasion by the American rebels, Boston and Ticonderoga again during the American Revolution, Ireland, Flanders during the Napoleonic wars, Gibraltar, Malta, the Caribbean, and extensive and fierce combat in India during the Sepoy Mutiny.

My depiction of these five imaginary toy soldiers (the proper term is Military Miniatures) of the 53rd has some egregious and obvious errors, even for imaginary soldiers. Slice or two of Pizza if you spot them.

* * * * * * *

I made this faux postage stamp a few Veterans Days ago, for my friend, Ron B. the artist. He and I served in the Army together during the Vietnam War.

Every Veterans Day we find ourselves compelled to get in touch with one another and transmit the strangest, most oblique messages to one another about our shared experience.

Handsome, even outlandish uniforms (like Zouaves and Dragoons) have always been one of the most effective lures for getting young men to join up. Young women do their part by being suckers for young men in handsome military uniforms.

If it seems that I am complaining about this, I am, and I also have serious issues with the Tides, and think they should be forced to come in and go out on an entirely different schedule.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no 53rd Regiment of Foot in anyone's army, and never was. I was trying to express the Essence or Spirit of

* handsome young men in sexy colorful military uniforms

* miniature soldiers (the proper term; toy soldiers are those cheap plastic things, a bag of 100 for $5)

When I compare my understanding of World War II with my experience of the Vietnam War, and my understanding of this Iraq War, I've reached the conclusion that WWII was the last American War that

* had to be fought, there was no way of avoiding it

* respected and safeguarded the lives of American soldiers, sailors, airmen.

Now, we blunder our way into new wars for dishonest, irrational reasons, and pay for these scoundrels' wars with the lives of our sons and daughters. At the end of the day, America is weaker, and more spiritually sick, because of these scoundrels' wars.

In the long block of relative peacetime that preceded these current wars, the "All-Volunteer Army" that replaced the draft (I was one of the last American draftees) was a subtle but effective machine which our political leaders built to fill our combat military with economically desperate young men and women, who could not afford college, and who faced a very hopeless civilian economy.

Now we are in hot shooting wars overseas, and our political leaders take political comfort and refuge that those who are dying and being maimed "volunteered" -- they asked for it, so we don't have to care as much for their lives and welfare as we cared about the lives of draftees.

There is much less public outrage about these combat deaths and casualties, very little demand for accountability as their bodies come back to Dover Air Force Base, which is sealed from the scrutiny of the press and public, so we cannot see the end result of what we have done.

Draftee or "volunteer," men are bottlenecked into making their decision about serving in the military typically around age 19. In the USA, a boy can join up with parental permission at 17.

The draft caught me when I was 22, and my nickname in Basic Training was "Old Man."

From 17 to 20, men/boys are of an age where they can make such a decision based on sexy uniforms, a big bag of outlandish lies and empty promises by military recruiters, and the desperation to get the fuck out of Indiana and cure an excruciating boredom. One night on The Tonight Show, Gene Hackman explained that "I joined the Marines 'cause I wanted to get laid."

On the whole, the military does a pretty reliable job of providing very cheap sexual opportunities for troops, particularly overseas.

I do not believe in Heaven or Hell, but I'm tempted to change my mind about that over wars like Vietnam and Iraq 2. We're never going to hold people like Bush and Rumsfeld, and MacNamara and Kissinger, accountable for the deaths and lifelong agonies of young American soldiers and Marines, but perhaps political scoundrels who lie us into ghastly Wars Without End could be called to account in a Special Place in Hell.

In my lifetime, Jimmy Carter seems to hold the prize for being the most cautious of all presidents about risking and wasting the lives of American soldiers.

Abraham Lincoln was a young congressman when President James K. Polk launched the Mexican War. Lincoln made blunt, angry speeches in Congress condemning this "Scoundrels' War" -- though he voted for every bill that supported our troops already in the field.

Carter was a Navy veteran and Lincoln was a veteran of the Black Hawk War.

Veterans can get very bitter when they find themselves helpless to prevent a new and needless waste of young soldiers' lives. Old veterans look at newsfilm of young soldiers and see themselves; to veterans, the TV is a Mirror.

The USA has a special Blur Machine which few other countries have. We have Hollywood. We can lose a catastrophic war, but then re-write it and re-play it all over again in movies -- and win this time. John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris have all blasted the crap out of the evil godless Communist Vietnamese, and stirringly and patriotically explained our virtuous reasons for fighting that war. Constant broadcasts of these movies on television year after year blur our memories -- and most of the audience doesn't even have memories anymore -- of what Vietnam really involved, of the military and political issues.

These Vietnam Retro Victory movies helped enormously to make a new American generation much less cautious about and much more eager to wage all-out aggressive war against Asian non-Christians who piss us off and disrespect us. We pay for Feeling Good about America Again with the lives and limbs of our neighbors' children, whose returning coffins we are not allowed to see being loaded off our military transport planes.

posted by Bob Merkin | 17:35
2 Comments:
Sharon Secor said...

I can only have faith that the forces of karma will deliver the appropriate justice to these criminals that send our country's youth to be maimed and killed in illegal and unnecessary wars. My brother's been to Iraq once. He's awaiting his orders to go to Afganistan.

A local news station ran a "feel-good piece" about Iraq vetrans with amputations learning to ski. As I was watching on a friend's TV, I had to do deep breathing excercises so that my head would not explode. We don't get real news about casualties, just these bullshit, scripted pieces...

Best Regards...
13:27

Bob Merkin said...

I have read several times, with government agencies' pride, that the greatest leap forward in inventing and developing modern leading-edge prosthetics that benefit so many American amputees was the Vietnam War.

Glass half-full or glass half-empty? Last night NBC News had a segment on the most-watched and most-commented-on of all the Super Bowl ads -- Anheuser-Busch's ad showing American soldiers returning from Iraq/Afghanistan through an American airport concourse, to the spontaneous applause of grateful American civilians. (The actors are all current or recent US servicemen and servicewomen; each was paid about $350 for appearing.)

Most people who commented about the ad were moved by it and felt it perfectly expressed the gratitude they felt for their servicemen and women serving in these wars. Some said they had actually witnessed such scenes at American airports.

But -- in the commentator's somewhat muted tone -- the troublesome issue of What The Ad Was Really All About was raised.

"Oh," a Madison Avenue beat reporter said, "it's about selling beer." (Budweiser, to be specific.)

After you shoot at them, and take them away from their families, and subject them to the toxins and poisons of the modern battlefield (this time something new: depleted uranium), and scramble their nervous systems and their psyches, there's always the opportunity to milk them for profit. One of Hollywood's favorite stock psychos and sad clowns is the crazed Vietnam Veteran, about whom the audience is now prepared to believe anything. Hollywood has made billions off Vietnam Veterans.
14:24

"To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan." -- Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address

Everybody click exactly the

same way at the same time.
Screw it up and you clean the toilets.

Well, that was pathetic. I didn't even remember how to draw a Peace Sign. (You may have begun to catch on by now: I am the Drunk Driver of Visual Art. Why real visual artists even speak to me is a total mystery.)

I thought it was just the skeleton of an inscribed equilateral triangle, but it sure isn't. The two lower radii are at 225° and 315°, and the vertical line completely bisects the circle.

I must be getting old. (This will be excruciatingly rubbed in my face on 5 February.) I can't even draw a Peace Sign. Once there was a time when you couldn't even have group sex on pot and LSD if you weren't wearing one of these.

Well -- now I can draw a Peace Sign, okay, so like I remembered.

I KNEW (some of) THIS! from Wikipedia:

This forked symbol was adopted as its badge by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain, and originally, its use was confined to supporters of that organization. It was later generalised to become an icon of the 1960s anti-war movement, and was also adopted by the counterculture of the time. It was designed and completed February 21, 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a commercial designer and artist in Britain. He had been commissioned by the CND to design a symbol for use at an Easter march to Canterbury Cathedral in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in England.

The symbol itself is a combination of the semaphoric signals for the letters "N" and "D," standing for Nuclear Disarmament.

The number of American military combat deaths on the stamp

58159

is from Wikipedia's article on the Vietnam War. The article lists several different numbers.

Though the first and most important of all duties of all sergeants and officers is to Count Their Soldiers every morning, and after every battle, big, long wars tend to get very fuzzy about the numbers of dead soldiers. We end up with Unknown Soldiers, whom we venerate with particularly holy shrines. And then we just lose a few thousand soldiers; our government just can't say what happened to them, whether they lived or died or were lost or vanished, or deserted to the enemy, whether they're on the dark side of the Moon, or ended up in those secret mythical POW camps in the jungles of Southeast Asia which Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris are always rescuing their lost comrades from.

Some of this fuzziness isn't the government's fault exactly. (Well, it is, of course -- the government started the war.) When a big-ass bomb or artillery shell goes off in a crowd of soldiers, they all get blown into lots of pieces, and no matter how carefully you try, you can't accurately tally how many got blown up or who they were. Dog tags (see Figure 1 above) are supposed to help, but so far nothing works perfectly. If you have to run away in a hurry and leave a dead soldier, you're supposed to take one of his dog tags and kick it between his teeth, so when you come back in a few weeks, no matter how badly decomposed the corpse is, you can identify him.

Happy the blest ages that knew not
the dread fury of those devilish
engines of artillery, whose inventor
I am persuaded is in hell
receiving the reward
of his diabolical invention ...

"Don Quixote"
Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
(1612 translation of Thomas Shelton)

How many American soldiers, Marines, sailors, Air Force, Coast Guard died in combat or from wounds received in the Vietnam War? Nobody knows, no one will ever know with certainty.

For a long time after the Vietnam war ended and then the Memorial was built in Washington DC, I thought the number was holding steady at about 48,000. Then when I checked a few years ago, it had crept up to 52,000. Down below in the black-ink text, that's the number I tossed out from memory.

I've cited the figure -- 58,159 -- of Webster's New World Dictionary of the Vietnam War, 1999, edited by Marc Leepson. You'll have to read it to find out how he arrived at that figure, and maybe it will explain why it's kept creeping up through the decades.

Sometimes soldiers die slowly, with years between combat trauma and eventually dying; first the military hospitals, and then the Veterans hospitals, just can't put Sgt. Dumpty back together again, but he holds on for years. That's what happened to one of my pals. He died back home as a discharged civilian and as a heroin addict, but I suspect it was the smallarms fire to his head on a boat on the Mekong River that really did it. But he took so long to finally die, with so much distance between him and the war, that the Department of Defense felt no obligation to add him to the war death tally and chisel his name on the Memorial.

At the top of the Wikipedia article is a padlock with this very interesting notice:

======
Because of recent vandalism or other disruption, editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled. Such users may discuss changes, request unprotection, or create an account.
======

Wikipedia is notoriously vulnerable to virtual vandalism, but why has its Vietnam War article become a particular target at this particular moment?

My guess is that as the Iraq War slogs on interminably into military hopelessness, and more and more American soldiers and Marines come back to Dover Air Force Base in flag-draped coffins, and as Bush's Folly more and more resembles the disaster of Vietnam, American Patriots (i.e., Bush supporters and war psychos who never served in uniform) are taking their political frustrations out on our dying echoes of Vietnam, which critics of the Iraq War keep pointing to.

Bush's Folly just cost him and his Republican Party both houses of the U.S. Congress. Every commentator I've seen or read attributes it almost entirely to voters' anger at the Bush Administration's invention and management of the Iraq War.

This curious phenomenon is like teenage swastika vandalism of Plymouth Rock or synagogues, mosques and Jewish cemeteries. Or the desecration of military memorials and cemeteries.

American conservatives widely and commonly view Wikipedia as leaning politically liberal or lefty. My perception is that Wikipedia (when not being vandalized) tries obsessively to be scrupulously and painfully accurate and factual. This would tend to piss off anyone who needs to make Reality behave in some different direction. Fox News relentlessly makes Reality behave in a very different direction from factual accuracy in a way conservatives find far more comforting and pleasant. On Fox News, we're winning the War in Iraq, we're winning the War on Terrorism, we're winning the War in Afghanistan. On Fox, Victory's just around the corner, the boys and girls will be home in time for Christmas.

What a Déjà Vu enema that is for Old Veteran Bob.

Bush's Folly now has the added distinction of disturbing the rest, peace and dignity of America's Vietnam war dead. All they are is dead this Veterans Day, and the living can't leave them alone. With mouse and trackball, in the privacy of their computers, the living urinate on the graves and on the memories of our Vietnam war dead; no need to wait for nightfall.

Leave A Comment. Or don't. Whatever. Be as pissed off or as controversial as you want. But no Anonymous Driveby Comments. Sign your work with a link that indicates who the fuck you are. Anonymous Driveby Comments will be removed instantly. Trespassers will be violated.

~ ~ ~

World War I ended in 1918, the Great Worldwide Economic Depression began with the Stock Market Crash in October 1929. This song became incredibly famous in 1932. Herbert Hoover was president, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated him in 1932 and was inaugurated in 1933 (and ended alcohol Prohibition, as he'd promised).

Two or three generations, woman, man, boy, girl, grandma, grandpa know it or knew it intimately. The tune is a bit maudlin, certainly very sad, mostly in the minor key. And yet you don't mind hearing it again when it comes on the radio. Most people who lived through the Depression just called it "the song." Every singer, good or bad, covered this song. Instrumental snatches of it appear frequently in American movies, to remind the audience's hearts of the Depression, and a lengthy kind of shared community unhappiness and misery much harsher than Bad Romance.

cf. "Hard Times Come Again No More" by Stephen Foster
and "Somebody's Darling"

Brother,
Can You Spare a Dime?

lyrics: E.Y. "Yip" Harburg
music: Jay Gorney

Lyrics as recorded by Bing Crosby.

If I can find this Manfred Helfert guy, he had a dead link to a Real Audio sound file. I'll let you know.

Intro:

They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there, right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead --
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Verses:

Once I built a railroad, made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done --
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower to the sun
brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done --
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum
Half a million boots went slogging through hell
And I was the kid with the drum --

Say, don't you remember? They called me Al
It was Al all the time
Why don't you remember? I'm your pal --
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Nobody's had a US or RA serial number since around 1971 when they started using Social Security Numbers. I had one of the last Army serial numbers. RA meant you enlisted for 3 years or longer. US meant you were drafted and only owed 2 years of active duty.

This is a pretty close facsimile of my dog tags which I still have around here somewhere -- with the pewter peace symbol I bought at a head shop. It was an Army crime to wear crap like this under your uniform, but nobody ever demanded I unbutton my blouse so they could check. And they would have had to build a very big military prison (stockade) to keep all the draftees who were wearing peace signs and other funky head shop crap around their necks.

Oh the Peace Sign ... during the Vietnam War, warhawks and True American Patriots and right-wing Kommie-hating psychopaths called it "the footprint of the American chicken." Soldiers were encouraged to call the Vietnamese "dinks" and "gooks" and "slopes."

I served from 22 March 1969 to 21 March 1971, was honorably discharged, and won 3 medals:

* the medal they give you for showing up

* the medal they give you for staying out of serious trouble and not getting drunk too often in public or ever getting caught with dope. I was never caught with dope.

* an important Army medal for very fast and very accurate typing in the Headquarters building

I also received a very nice letter from my Commander-in-Chief, Richard M. Nixon, thanking me for my patriotic service. Of course it's a machine signature. He had enough troubles around then, he didn't also need writer's cramp or arthritis or repetitive motion syndrome.

I loved the Senate Watergate Hearings, and his Impeachment hearings before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives.

Government has one obligation which, if it fucks up everything else, it must give the American People: To entertain. That was a very entertaining couple of years. Lots of rich and powerful Republicans, and lots of young Republican toady suckups who would do anything to get rich and powerful, went to minimum-security federal prisons. The former Attorney General, a very wealthy and powerful white man, went to federal prison. I wonder how many draft refusers he met inside.

I had the same job Al Gore had, enlisted Army journalist -- Information Specialist, 71Q20, and then when I got a little rank, 71Q40. I told whatever lies I was told to tell for a couple of primitive base publications. And took photos with a huge old Speed Graphic camera.

They gave me orders to go to Vietnam, but the orders were fucked up, so I had to serve my last year on the beach of the Gulf of Mexico in South Texas. I had a big-ass Triumph motorcycle. Except for the fact that you could get orders for Vietnam any day and then get shot in the head or blown up in the genitals, that last year was pretty fucking pleasant, as Army time goes.

It was a very fucked-up stupid loser war that went on for a very long time and killed about 52,000 (that's wrong; see red text above) American soldiers, sailors, marines, and I guess a few Air Force people and even the occasional extremely unlucky Coast Guard person. Yes, a considerable number of women in uniform got dead from the Vietnam War.

We had to Stay The Course. America couldn't Cut and Run. We were the most powerful military force on Earth. The enemy wore pajamas, had no tanks or airplanes or boats to speak of, and rode bicycles from battle to battle. It was unimaginable that little short non-Christian Asian Marxist people could kick the shit out of our military and eventually make us run away. They never fought us man-to-man where we could see them like Americans, they were sneaky and boobytrapped the jungle and hid in holes they dug in the ground, and they didn't believe in God or go to church.

Today Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld finally got fired. He really did a fine job with the Iraq War.

During the Hot Parts of the interminable Vietnam War, the Secretaries of Defense were Robert McNamara, Clark Clifford, Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson and James Schlesinger. These guys could fuck up a wet dream, too. The big general in charge of the war was William Westmoreland. Our big generals in Iraq are equally talented and successful.

Nixon and Kissinger held out for Peace with Honor.

Does any of this sound in the least familiar? I am having *such* a Déjà Vu thing right now. It just REMINDS me of Something ...

Anyway, if you love Bob, send me something for Veterans Day. Use your imagination.

If you REALLY love Bob, stop this fucking Iraq War for me for Veterans Day, bring everybody home immediately, and let the local Asian people sort out the post-colonial 8th Crusade psycho depleted Uranium mess we've made. Stop shooting and bombing these human beings, let them shoot and bomb each other and grow opium for awhile, and after we all go home, send them lots of our wealthy American money, and let them spend it the way they like.

In Australia and New Zealand it's Remembrance Day. Australian military vets got it particularly bad, you know, the usual, suicide, divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction, prison, weird cancers and cancer-like diseases, just like American vets and just like Russian vets from Afghanistan.

And tons of homelessness. In about 2 weeks it's my first night working at the emergency winter church alliance cot shelter. Or, as I like to call it on most nights: The Old Vets' Reunion.

Sincerity: ON

O Dear Lord please let there not be any vets from Iraq 2 there.

But they probably will be there. That motherfucking war has been running for a very long time now. Plenty of time for them to have been discharged and to find our shelter. I'll serve them a hot meal, now and then I'll have the privilege of cooking part of it.

Oh -- they weren't drafted. They all volunteered. So if they're homeless, it's not so bad, and somehow it's their own personal responsibility and bad choices they made. We don't owe them a fucking thing.

My town has a little federal Veterans Hospital (in the village we call Leeds). I've lived in this town for 25 years. Let me tell you how this fucking hospital treats my brother and sister vets, from all America's wars. Let me tell you how the Department of Veterans Affairs treats vets.

Let me tell you how the DVA is going to treat the vets of the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. Oh yeah I can stand on a chair and see the next decades of how the Department of Veterans Affairs will treat Iraq and Afghanistan War vets verrrrrrrrrrrry crisply. What's Past Is Prologue.

Or Worse.

Very early in the morning we feed them a cold cereal and fruit breakfast with hot coffee, stuff some sandwiches into their pockets, and then send them out into the bitter cold all day, without warm clothes. The shelter re-opens the next night at 6 pm, and runs from Halloween to 1 May.

After that the guests are allowed to sleep under the stars.

The Title of this Post is the big slogan out on the front lawn of the entrance to the little Veterans Hospital in Leeds.

"To care for him who shall have
borne the battle and for his widow,
and his orphan."

It's from Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, in which he told the nation his plans for healing the pain, loss and suffering caused by the Civil War, which was finally blessedly ending.

If it's not, Leave A Comment. I like Comments from people who know Abraham Lincoln's speeches.

Lincoln was a veteran of the Black Hawk War. His Illinois townsmen elected him their captain, and they chased Sauk and Fox Indians for a year, but never caught or hurt or saw any.

One of Lincoln's combat generals, the German revolutionary and immigrant Carl Schurz, became Secretary of the Interior, and made the Army stop trying to kill and capture a desperate, tiny, starving band of Cheyenne who had escaped their reservation, and let them stay in their traditional Montana lands unmolested by the Army or the United States Government.

~ ~ ~

When in Berlin, Germany, please visit the Anti-Kriegs Museum in the Wedding district. Then check out the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. Real Freedom and Courage and Human Dignity from everywhere on Earth the way real women, men, children, even soldiers cook it and make it happen, with little or no assistance from government officials or politicians.

oh i really thought that i was cool / drivin around on fossil fuel / now i see what i was doin / was ridin down the Road To Ruin (--James Taylor)

Saudi saying:

My father rode a camel.

I drive a car.

My son flies a jet plane.

His son will ride a camel.

men's coded puzzle message t-shirts also available

partially decrypted bumper stickers and t-shirt messages

Klicken Sie hier,
besser zu machen.

The boffins at Yankee Magnetic Software had some fun running the bumper sticker jumble puzzle proggie and looking for all the times that the string "BUSH" or "IMPEACH" just accidentally, spontaneously came up. If you're worried that your neighbors are too fucking dumb to decode your message while they try to kiss your rear bumper at 65 miles an hour or stare at your breasts on the sidewalk, you might want one of these.

BUSH is 4 letters long and IMPEACH is 7 letters long, so the odds were pretty good that BUSH would pop up pretty often, and the odds looked grim -- zilch in all the runs I tried today -- that IMPEACH would pop up.

If I was a little better at Combinatorics (buy some aspirin, take the class), I could predict roughly how long it would take the program to spew out any specific string n letters long, but I suck at Combinatorics.

For example, if you're waiting for the computer to accidentally spew out IMPEACH, some fairly simple arithmetic could tell you if you should keep parking your ass in front of the computer, or if you can take a pee, or watch Oprah, or cook dinner, or pick up some Asian takeaway/takeout, or take a trip to Philadelphia. (I like to write programs that require several days or a week to finish running.) I just let it run for about 10 minutes, and IMPEACH never came up. I suspect it would take hours, maybe more than a day.

(If you comprehend the arcane math branch Combinatorics -- well, Leave A Comment.)

Technically this kind of jumble code is called a Simple Substitution Code. If you used a Trap Door or Large Prime Pair code or One-Way Encryption code, people would have to stare at your breasts for decades before they figured out what you were trying to tell them.

In theory, if I used a One-Time-Pad code, they'd never be able to decrypt the message unless they had the same One-Time-Pad I used to encrypt the Plain Text.

So if you use a One-Time-Pad code, it's not about politics, it's entirely about wanting people to stare at your breasts or follow your rear bumper down the highway for hours.

In the previous post, maybe you thought I was getting a little too enthusiastic about the prospect of Impeachment after January. Or maybe you just thought I was on LSD or tequila. (Mel Gibson had been drinking tequila the evening the Jewish police officer pulled him over, and has since added that he has a fondness for another pleasant Mexican beverage, mescal.)

Actually as tomorrow's election approaches, Republicans and Bush Fans are quite anxious and freaked out about the prospect. On Undernet channel #FascistRightWingNutJob , they're jabbering worriedly about the leftmost wing of Congressional Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, who will probably become the next Speaker of the House (and the first woman to hold that gig), has publicly stated that the I-word is "not on the table" when the Democrats take over. And she'll be the Gatekeeper to block or permit Impeachment hearings to begin in the House Judiciary Committee.

Interesting little Constitutional nuance here, if I understand it correctly. Please Leave A Comment if you can illuminate it further.

If the Senate retains a Republican majority, the Senate still can't Refuse to hold a Trial if the House sends them a Bill of Indictment. All the Republican Senators can do is vote Not Guilty when the Trial ends.

(Several Republican Senators, terrified of angry vengeance from their own voters, voted Not Guilty at the end of the Presidential Lying About Fellatio Trial. Possibly several Married Republican Gentlemen Senators tried to imagine what they would have said to Mrs. Senator when photos of Vivika and the Senator hugging and smiling started appearing on the front page. Is this a moment for The Whole Truth? Will Good Things certainly follow if you tell Mrs. Senator Nothing But The Truth? Leave A Comment.)

But if the House testimony is smarmy and shocking enough, if there are several Smoking Guns among the subpoenaed documents, some Republican Senators may say "Fuck this shit" and vote to convict anyway. If Republicans retain control of the Senate after Tuesday, their margin of majority will be very slim, and it will only take a handful of Republican mavericks to defy party discipline and make the Senate verdict Guilty.

Regardless of how warm and patriotic a Republican Senator feels toward his Commander in Chief, before the final vote of an impeachment trial, the Senator has to go home and listen to his neighbors = voters. If enough of them are screaming to order a guillotine from France, they'll vote the way that will most likely get them re-elected. So in that sense, ultimately the verdict will be up to the (loudest) people. A Senator must stand for re-election every 6 years, one-third of the races every 2 years.

If the White House is smart, Wednesday is when they should start shredding documents and re-formating hard disks.

Okay, here are the bumper stickers and t-shirt messages with little Hints & Clues in them, courtesy of the nice folks at Yankee Magnetic Software:

0995 EIHBUSH MPAC
1549 PIMCHAB USHE
1746 IAPMBUS HEHC
3054 BUSHACI HMPE
3451 AMBUSHE CHIP
4424 BUSHCEM AHPI
5046 EACIMPB USHH
6404 PEMHCBU SHAI
7055 BUSHCAI EMPH
8560 EBUSHCH IMPA
9587 MHIBUSH PCEA
9612 MHABUSH EICP
9658 HEMCAPB USHI

Free Puzzle Bumper Stickers & T-shirt messages! Share your Feelings even if you're shy or timid or nervous!

Free puzzle bumper stickers and t-shirt messages for the shy and discreet.

Yankee Magnetic Software, my Software enterprise, randomized them for me. Untouched by Human Hands. Encoded entirely by Robots.

Drive around all over town and let the curious try to solve the puzzle on your rear bumper. Walk around all over town and let the curious try to solve the puzzle on your chest. What are you trying to say to your neighbors? Maybe they'll ask you what it means. You're free not to tell them, but to give them a minute to decode the text.

It looks as if the House of Representatives is, after a decade of Republican control, about to flip to Democratic control.

Every House committee will now be chaired by a Democrat.

Impeachment hearings begin in the House of Representatives, specifically before the House Judiciary Committee.

Several Congressional minority leaders have been openly calling for impeachment hearings, but up till now, it was only hot air, because the Republican leaders would never allow any call for impeachment hearings to reach a committee vote. No one could ever even know how many and which members of the Committee were in favor of starting impeachment proceedings.

But after the New Year, after swearing-in the new Congress and installing its Democratic committee chairs, it could happen. Hearings. Subpoenas. Witnesses. Testimony. And then, finally, a commitee vote on whether to send the findings to the full House of Representatives for a vote.

(If that vote passes, the actual Trial begins in the U.S. Senate. You probably remember the Senate Trial of the High Crime or Misdemeanor of Extramarital Fellatio. That's what Republicans think two of the three branches of the U.S. government have to shut down for for a year.)

(To be fair, the Republicans say it wasn't about Fellatio, it was about Lying about Fellatio. Whatever ... even the Republicans were scared to convict and remove the president for it. Clinton got his Fellatio, served his entire eight years, and is now an extremely popular ex-president. He's always smiling and most people smile when they see him smile.)

Those are the first steps according to the Constitution. And the most entertaining. That's when the American and world public really get to hear the secret gossip, the hidden sleaze and smut, the dirty secrets, the range of opinions. That's when we all learn lots of nifty, new things the White House had done during the last six years which no one ever knew about.

You can plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and keep your mouth shut about what you know, but you can't lie to a Congressional committee under oath. If they catch you lying to a House committee under oath, that's perjury, and a felony. Guaranteed prison time (in one of the nicer, more pleasant federal minimum-security facilities for educated, professional men and women). Don't think it can't happen to successful rich white Republican lawyers and businessmen. About a score of them -- including the U.S. Attorney General -- went to federal prison when the Watergate scandal exploded.

In case you don't remember how Watergate ended up, President Nixon had to resign and leave town. Again, his own Republicans in the House of Representatives were the guys who put the final banana peel under his feet. Nixon's the only president who ever resigned before his term of office finished. No president has ever been convicted in a Senate impeachment trial and removed from office.

Yet.

There'll be lots of entertainment when senior White House and Defense Department and Homeland Security officials testify under oath before Congress, even if most of what they do is invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against being forced to incriminate themselves in criminal acts.

Because if you refuse to testify, everybody watching you on live television just naturally assumes you committed criminal acts and don't want to go to prison.

That's not how the law works, of course: Judges and juries are prohibited from interpreting a witness's invoking his/her Fifth Amendment rights as any hint of admitting guilt.

But it sure looks sleazy and low-rent.

Historically in the history of Congressional hearings, we associate invoking the Fifth Amendment with Mafia bosses and Communists during the Cold War (when just being a Communist was a federal crime). So that's how the public will think about 30 or 40 senior and mid-level administration officials: like gangsters and Communists. (And like all those Nixon administration officials.)

I'm seeing more and more of the Unscrambled bumper stickers, with the message en claire. Saw one today in downtown Northampton. People are getting brazen and nervy, people are getting very In Your Face about impeachment. (See Vleeptron Comments going back at least 2 years particular from a New England divine.)

If you're a bit less In Your Face, if you're a tad shy, here are the free Bumper Stickers & T-Shirt Messages:

ESMPHHC UBIA

CHHEIUA BMPS

IAMUSCP HHBE

MAEUCHI HSBP

HCPEIMH BAUS

HAHSCUI MEBP

HUHMCIB AEPS

PBMSAHU ICHE

PBIHCHA SUME

PHEMCIH UASB

APHIMUE CBSH

SPEHBCI HUAM

Don't forget to put http://vleeptronz.blogspot.com in small letters in the corner.

Thank you, Lord

Ted Haggard
Photo: Dennis Oda / Honolulu Star-Bulletin

Reuters
Thursday 2 November 20:48 USA East Coast
2006 Election Coverage

Senior U.S. evangelical
steps down over sex scandal

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) -- The president of America's National Association of Evangelicals, who has been a vocal opponent of gay marriage, resigned on Thursday after an accusation he had a sexual relationship with a male escort.

Ted Haggard, who denied the accusation, also "resigned temporarily" as senior pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, according to a statement from the church.

"I've never had a gay relationship with anyone," Haggard said in an interview with Denver television station KUSA on Wednesday night. "I'm steady with my wife. I'm faithful to my wife."

The New Life Church statement said Haggard could "not continue to minister under the cloud created by the accusations."

"I am voluntarily stepping aside from leadership so that the overseer process can be allowed to proceed with integrity. I hope to be able to discuss this matter in more detail at a later date," Haggard said in the statement.

Mike Jones, who said he was a male escort, told KUSA on Wednesday he conducted a three-year sexual "business relationship" with Haggard.

Haggard supports a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution that defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

Colorado voters will decide that issue next week when they vote in the congressional elections.

- 30 -

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

===============

KRDO-TV / Stormtracker 13
ABC affiliate Television station
Colorado Springs / Pueblo, Colorado
Posted: 5:25 PM, Nov. 2, 2006
Last Updated: 8:58 PM, Nov. 2, 2006

Pastor Ted Haggard
of Colorado Springs New Life Church
Is On Leave Pending Investigation
Into Sex Charges.

Charges Surfaced On Denver Talk Show

by Dave Rose and Tak Landrock

Reverend Ted Haggard, Senior Pastor of the 14-thousand member New Life Church in Colorado Springs has placed himself on leave from his church duties and has resigned from his position as president of the National Association of Evangelicals. This action follows charges that Haggard had a "sexual business relationship" with male escort from Denver.

The escort, Mike Jones, tells reporters that he is stepping forward with the charges now because he is concerned that Haggard doesn't practice what he preaches. Jones laid out his charges during a talk show on Denver radio station KHOW.

Pastor Haggard denied the accusations in an interview with Denver television station KUSA Wednesday night. Haggard told the television station that he doesn't know Mike Jones and has never had a relationship outside his marriage. NewsChannel 13 was in contact with Carolyn Haggard, a spokesperson for New Life Church by both telephone and e-mail starting early Thursday morning. We were lead to believe that there would be an opportunity to discuss the allegations further with Haggard this afternoon but later phone calls went unanswered.

A statement issued by New Life Church Thursday afternoon confirmed that Haggard is on leave and his resignation from the National Association of Evangelicals. In his capacity with the National Association Haggard has been a vocal supporter of the Colorado Marriage Amendment which would place language in the state constitution defining marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman. That ammendment has drawn angry opposition from gay rights groups.

Many Haggard supporters question the timing of the allegations just days before the general election. The group, Coloradans for Marriage, issued a statement Thursday afternoon saying, "This is a difficult situation for Pastor Haggard and his family. However we will not let this distract our efforts to pass the Colorado Marriage Amendment ..."

Mike Jones, the male escort making the charges against Haggard, claims to have voice messages and other evidence that will support his charges. Jones claims his relationship with Haggard continued over a three year period.

- 30 -

============

Gay.com

Christian bigwig quits
over gay sex scandal

The president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals resigned his post and took leave from his church Thursday, one day after a gay male escort claimed having a three-year sexual relationship with him, the Associated Press reported. Ted Haggard, one of America's leading Christ

* Fighting religious-based oppression
* Evangelicals fuel Colo. gay ban
* Polled Colo. voters OK with partnerships
* Dueling marriage measures vie in Colo.
* Christian bigwig quits over gay sex scandal

Christian bigwig quits over gay sex scandal

published Thursday, November 2, 2006

The president of the 30-million-member National Association of Evangelicals resigned his post and took leave from his church Thursday, one day after a gay male escort claimed having a three-year sexual relationship with him, the Associated Press reported.

Ted Haggard, one of America's leading Christian-right figures, is the founder and senior pastor of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

Haggard denied the accusations Wednesday in an interview with Colorado TV station KUSA. But in a statement the next day, he said he "could not continue to minister under the cloud created by the accusations" of Mike Jones.

Jones, 49, told Denver's KHOW-AM radio Wednesday that he and Haggard had been in a "sexual business" relationship for the past three years, and that Haggard had used methamphetamine in his presence during their monthly trysts.

"People may look at me and think what I've done is immoral, but I think I had to do the moral thing in my mind, and that is expose someone who is preaching one thing and doing the opposite behind everybody's back," Jones told KUSA.

Haggard, also 49, is married with five children and stringently anti-gay. He supports Amendment 43, a harsh marriage ban that is one of two gay-related measures on next week's Colorado ballot.

"I don't know if this is election-year politics or if this has to do with the marriage amendment or what it is," Haggard told the TV station.

The other measure, doing well in Colorado polls, would grant unmarried couples some domestic-partner protections. KUSA denied any "October surprises," claiming it began talking with Jones more than two months ago.

Jones said that he had advertised himself as an escort on the Internet and that a man who called himself Art contacted him. Jones said he later saw the man on TV identified as Haggard.

He that he last had sex with Haggard in August and that he did not warn him before making his allegations this week.

Jones said he has voice-mail messages from Haggard, as well as an envelope he said Haggard used to mail him cash, though he declined to make any of it available to the AP.

"There's some stuff on there (the voice mails) that's pretty damning," he said.

The church, meanwhile, has announced an investigation, to be followed by a decision by its board of overseers.

Church legal counsel Martin Nussbaum told the TV station that, according to the church's bylaws, when an allegation of immorality is made, a pastor is supposed to go on leave while the rest of the board makes a decision on his future. He said Haggard's actions are not an admission of guilt.

Haggard, a 1978 graduate of Oral Roberts University, was appointed president of the association in March 2003. He has participated in Christian-right leaders' conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied members of Congress last year on U.S. Supreme Court appointees after Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement, AP reported.

"I made myself cry and I made myself sick," Jones told the Denver Post of his decision to come forward. "I felt I owed this to the community. What he is saying is we are not worthy, but he is." (Advocate)

- 30 -

================

Post a comment | View all comments
velsa... (11/2/2006 8:07 PM PST)

I totally agree with Straig...'s comment so I am copying it: One more Republican hypocrite ousted. This serves only to prove that those who hate gays are themselves gay. If you are truly straight you …
ty_the... (11/2/2006 8:11 PM PST)

I feel sorry for Haggard if the allegations are true. I know what it is like trying to cure oneself of homosexuality by hating it and everyone that is homosexual. it doesnt work. Living a lie never…

velsa... (11/2/2006 8:20 PM PST)

joeyba... said: "Remember, everyone has a right to their beliefs and opinions, even if we dont agree. Innocent until proven guilty. But if guilty, it will be another hipocrite out of business. Ca…
bball2... (11/2/2006 8:22 PM PST)

Did Haggard bottom or top?

* ©1995-2006 PLANETOUT INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

=============

Christianity Today
November 2005 (cover story)
Good Morning, Evangelicals!

Meet Ted Haggard
the NAE's optimistic champion
of ecumenical evangelism
and free-market faith.

by Tim Stafford

In his second-story church office, with its spectacular view of Colorado's Front Range, Ted Haggard spars playfully with a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Established East Coast newspapers haven't always sent reporters to interview pastors in Colorado, no matter how big their churches got. Times have changed.

In February, Harper's Magazine devoted 14 pages to Pastor Ted and his New Life Church in Colorado Springs, depicting him and his neighbor James Dobson as the two most powerful (and therefore dangerous) evangelicals in America. The piece by Jeff Sharlet was mostly scary atmospherics -- he made much of the muscular warrior angels that adorn Haggard's World Prayer Center -- but it helped draw reporters. Today, Haggard is talking to the BBC and an XM radio talk-show host, in addition to the Inquirer's Paul Nussbaum.

Since Harper's placed Haggard somewhere on the spectrum between the Grand Inquisitor and William Jennings Bryan, you might expect Haggard to treat the press stiffly. On the contrary, he speaks appreciatively of Sharlet and seems genuinely eager to talk to Nussbaum. Haggard and his staff tell reporters to go anywhere, film anything, and talk to anybody.

Early this year, Haggard did send a memo to his congregation, tutoring them in proper behavior with TV reporters. "If a camera is on you during a worship service, worship; don't dance, jump, etc.

* Jumping and dancing in church looks too bizarre for most to relate to.
* Don't talk about the Devil, demons, voices speaking to you.
* Instead, tell your personal story in common-sense language.
* Don't be spooky or weird. Don't switch into a glassy-eyed heavenly mode."

Haggard believes in territorial spirits, demonic oppression, visions, and voices from heaven. New Life worship is free and physical. Yet Haggard was coaching his congregation to act the way he does, which is anything but spooky or weird.

"He doesn't carry Pentecostalism as a chip on his shoulder," notes Pentecostal historian Vinson Synan. Jack Hayford marvels at how naturally Haggard expresses himself in terms that appeal outside the evangelical community. "I have to work to think, How can I say these things? This stuff just flows out of Ted."

Who Is an Evangelical?

"When I became president of the NAE [National Association of Evangelicals]," Haggard tells the Inquirer's Nussbaum, "the talk was about doing away with the term evangelical. Evangelicalism was morphing and changing so much that people were wondering if the term applied. The first decision I made as president was to start using the term prolifically and defining it simply. I define an evangelical as a person who believes Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that the Bible is the Word of God, and that you must be born again."

Haggard, who is 49 but looks younger, with sandy hair and eyes that squint when he grins, goes on to explain that the 2004 presidential election has increased popular interest in the evangelical movement.

"Is it correct to say 'values voters' are evangelicals?" Nussbaum asks.

"Yes."

"Because, by your definition, Jimmy Carter is an evangelical."

"He is."

"Bill Clinton?"

"He is an evangelical."

"Hilary Clinton."

"No, she is not."

"So, which of these definitions doesn't she meet?"

"I'm not going to say."

Nor will he budge from that reticence, though Nussbaum gently badgers him. Haggard loves to talk, and Nussbaum has caught him making an off-the-cuff pronouncement he is unwilling or unable to substantiate. Yet Haggard seems about as chastened as Huck Finn apprehended with Aunt Polly's strawberry jam. Rather than becoming frosty or severe, Haggard surges forward into his topic.

"Evangelicalism is a continuum of theologies all the way from Benny Hinn to R. C. Sproul. The R. C. Sproul crowd has a hard time with Benny Hinn, and the Benny Hinn crowd has a hard time with R. C. Sproul. But they're all evangelicals.

"Evangelical does not mean any particular political ideology," Haggard continues. "The African American [evangelical] community has an honorable concern for social justice, and that affects their politics. That concern comes from the Scripture. The Anglo community has a different history, so different Scriptures stand out to them. To the Anglo [evangelical] community, most of their sermons are theological. It's salvation by grace through faith, and other theological points, so social-justice issues don't have the same compelling justification.

"I have a deep love and appreciation for that diversity. I think it's some of the wonder of the body of Christ. I feel like my role is to help the various members of the body respect one another and appreciate one another, and work together."

Changing Evangelicals

While much press attention has shone on American evangelicals' new prominence, less light has focused on a corresponding change in the nature of evangelicals. Case in point: Ted Haggard and the NAE.

The National Association of Evangelicals began during the Second World War, an era when evangelicals had lost much of their influence. Liberal theology was ascendant in many denominations and seminaries.

The NAE was formed for defense -- to provide intellectual respectability and organizational counterweight. Its statement of faith, used by many organizations to this day, drew clear lines for scattered evangelicals to rally behind. This cross-denominational fellowship gave evangelicals representation with government agencies like the FCC, to give them more TV access, and with the military in its chaplain selection. Church leaders met at the NAE's annual convention to compare notes and reinvigorate their relationships. The early NAE was almost entirely white, eminently respectable, deeply intellectual, and fervent in piety. It represented evangelicalism as it wanted to be seen: men in dark suits with advanced degrees. Evangelicalism's rural, enthusiastic, anti-intellectual cousins were kept mainly out of sight.

During the 1980s and 1990s, evangelicalism changed from embattled minority to the most visible and vital sector of American Protestantism. Furthermore, evangelicals became a potent political force.

Haggard was elected president of the NAE in 2003, succeeding Leith Anderson, who saved the organization from a financial crisis that almost sank it. The financial difficulties were symptomatic of a deeper problem. Evangelicalism had changed, but the NAE had not. Its Washington office, led by Richard Cizik, had a growing insider's voice in the political world. But to the larger world the organization had become, in Jack Hayford's words, "a kind of an old men's club."

Haggard represents a new direction and a new kind of evangelical leader. He pastors an independent, charismatic megachurch. He has no advanced degrees. He rarely wears a suit and drives a pickup truck with a Napoleon Dynamite "Vote for Pedro" bumper sticker. He is ebullient, not cautious. The NAE has gained media attention with him in the spotlight.

When people describe Haggard, they grasp for words to express how sunny and optimistic he is. John Stevens, retired pastor of Colorado Springs' First Presbyterian Church, told the Colorado Springs Gazette, "It's really pretty hard not to like Ted Haggard. You can not like some of the things he does, or some of the things he might say on occasion, but it's pretty hard not to like him personally."

His celebrity may continue to grow, but Haggard believes only one cause is big enough and important enough to bring together today's evangelicals -- evangelism.

He laid out the case 10 years ago in Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go to Hell from Your City. If you want to make an impact on your city, he says, it's not enough for one church or one denomination to do well. All the churches in the city need to do well. For 20 years in Colorado Springs he has pursued that point of view, working at building up all its "life-giving" churches, from whatever denomination. Through the NAE, Haggard hopes to accomplish at a national level what he has worked for in Colorado Springs -- fostering a cooperative, active, outward spirit in all evangelical churches.

New Life's Unusual Strategy

New Life's building has all the grace and charm of a Super Wal-Mart, but its inelegant bulk is swallowed up by the vast open spaces of the Rocky Mountains. Across the valley, the Air Force Academy's jagged, jet-age steel structures are clearly visible below the Front Range. Just down the road is the campus of James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Dobson and he are good friends, Haggard says, though they lead with very different styles.

Focus on the Family has a tightly controlled corporate environment. Employees follow a strict dress code and would never let a reporter roam the campus unescorted.

If New Life had a dress code, it would include sports sandals and T-shirts. Weekday staff meetings for the 200 or so employees might be mistaken for a youth rally -- or perhaps a Coors commercial, minus the beer. Pastors read the Scriptures from their BlackBerrys, and there is a high level of teasing, laughing, and applause among the staff, with Haggard leading the hijinks.

Haggard came to Colorado Springs in 1984, holding his first worship services in January 1985 in the unfinished basement of his home. He stacked three five-gallon buckets on top of each other for a pulpit and asked worshipers to bring their lawn chairs.

Raised in farm-town, church-attending Indiana, one of six children, Haggard was born again in high school while attending Campus Crusade's Explo '72. He followed up college at Oral Roberts University with a brief stint working for a West German Bible-smuggling organization. He then joined the staff of Bethany Baptist Church (now Bethany World Prayer Center) in Baker, Louisiana. He had been there for five happy years when his life's calling came.

While on vacation in Colorado, Haggard camped alone on the slopes of Pike's Peak for three days. Praying and fasting, he sensed a call to Colorado Springs. He promptly moved his family there.

The dramatic beginnings of New Life Church included visions and prophecies of future ministry. Haggard tells of satanic opposition, including anonymous death threats on the telephone and someone making cat-screeching noises from the field behind his home. There were anointings with oil-- five whole gallons at one point -- and cartwheels during worship. Growth was nothing short of spectacular. The church moved out of the basement in four months, and then inhabited a series of ever-bigger commercial sites before building their own facility in 1990. The current auditorium, dedicated in January of this year, seats 8,000 and has section numbers like a basketball arena.

Such a spectacular storyline is almost traditional for independent, charismatic megachurches, but New Life's history includes some unusual notes. For one, Haggard was less interested in building a megachurch than he was in transforming a city. For another, he saw that he was not in competition with other churches. Quite the opposite: Competition between churches in Colorado Springs impeded him. Haggard means something fairly subtle by competition. For example, he picks a bone with a pastor who advertises his church's "exciting services with practical, relevant Bible teaching." According to Haggard, such a slogan really says, "My church is more exciting than the one you go to."

Haggard's publicly stated goal is that all "life-giving" churches in Colorado Springs grow. He urges each church, including his own, to keep their doctrinal specialties inside the walls of the church, while broadcasting a common-ground "mere Christianity" outside. New Life people strenuously avoid criticizing other Christians. Success, as they measure it, is not their own church's attendance figures, but the total attendance at all of the churches in Colorado Springs.

Learning from Communist Society

Haggard is all about evangelism, but more than just evangelism. The New Life Church bookstore has a shelf marked "Pastor Ted Recommends." Prominently displayed are books by culture warriors like Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly, but also books by public-policy experts, historians, and analysts of secular culture like Dinesh D'Souza, Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Newt Gingrich, Thomas Friedman, and David Gergen. Yet we are in a church bookstore, where nearly all the titles are inspirational. Haggard is telling his congregation, Think big. Think about the whole world. The Bible does not tell you everything you need to know.

Haggard says he can pinpoint precisely where he learned to shift effortlessly from the religious to the secular. While a student at Oral Roberts University, he took a class entitled "Evangelicals and Communist Society." He was particularly struck by unconfirmed tales of Albanian believers taken by police to the shores of the Adriatic Sea. The police stuffed the believers into barrels and then, while the victims' families watched, floated the barrels into the water and took target practice.

"When I heard those stories I thought, What did those people pray in those barrels? They knew in a few seconds they were either going to be shot to death or shot up enough to drown. Could I invest my life to answer those prayers?

"What do you think they prayed? They prayed, 'God protect my family. God take care of my little kids.' How do you give them the best chance at having a good life? That became my clarion call: to make life better for people.

"It's not hard. They need to live in a society where there's freedom of religion. And if they want to gather up some wood and make chairs and sell them on the corner, they need to be able to do it. Free markets. Free markets have done more to help poor people than any benevolent organization ever has."

But Jesus made no mention of free markets, Haggard is reminded. Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell all and give to the poor.

"But Jesus was in the 1st century," Haggard answers, "and we're in the 21st century.

"The Scripture is the Word of God, and nothing else is. But if the Scripture says we have an obligation to the poor, then you have to take what we've learned in the last 2,000 years to help poor people not to be poor. If the Scripture says we have an obligation to the oppressed, then you have to take what we learned in the last 2,000 years to help oppressed people. I maintain that we learned more about those subjects in the 20th century than in any other single century."

Haggard is so enthusiastic about free-market economics that he applies it to church. New Life offers hundreds of small-group activities, everything from "Growing in God as a Wife and Mother" to "Holy Hip-Hop Jam Session." How do the pastors decide what to include? They don't. If someone comes up with an idea, and that person passes a basic screening, the church will help promote the group. New Life organizes the marketplace but leaves the details to the people, who write their own programs.

Gleeful Optimism

Haggard is a natural optimist in an evangelical culture that has sometimes tended toward pessimism about society. His fellow charismatics and Pentecostals, he says, often bemoan that there are no prophets in the modern world. He refers them to Bill Bright. " 'God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.' Think about that. That was a major prophetic statement into his generation.

"You talk about optimism. I'm a depressed, narrow-thinking man in need of medication compared to Bill Bright. That's in my spiritual genetics. Bill Bright is deep in me." Haggard proudly displays a relay runner's gold baton. Bill Bright gave it to him not long before his death, intending to confer on Haggard the responsibility for winning the world to Christ.

Haggard rejects the dispensationalism of The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind novels. "There is no evidence that we should be anything but optimists," Haggard says. "It was just three years ago that we were saying we support Israel because it's the only democracy in the Middle East. And now there are potentially four: Lebanon, Afghanistan, Israel, and Iraq. Three are iffy, no doubt about it, but we can't say Israel is the only one anymore.

"The trends of the last 40 years should make us optimistic. More people are living under representative government than ever before in history. More people's civil liberties are protected than ever before in history. Women have greater opportunity than ever before in history. Fewer wars than ever before in history. We are really doing a good job of improving global economics and food distribution systems. The fact that [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair met with [religious leaders, including Haggard] to talk about the biggest aid initiative in world history, that's good news."

In Letters from Home, Haggard's book of advice for his children, he tells of a word from God he had while watching a baseball game at summer camp. At one moment "the Holy Spirit came upon me and said, 'If you will obey me, your life will work like this.'" Haggard watched as the team at bat began to hit every ball, scoring again and again. Then, "the Holy Spirit came on me again and said, 'If you disobey me, your life will go like this.'" The team got few hits. Their opponents became formidable.

Earlier generations of Christians didn't find life easy, Haggard acknowledges. Neither do Christians who live where faith is oppressed or where few opportunities exist. But for Christians in Colorado Springs, "I do not believe life is so hard. I think it is easy to live a good life." Just when did you hear an evangelical leader say that?

Imperfect Consistency

"He thinks strategically, how to get things done," says Ross Parsley, New Life's worship leader and one of Haggard's best friends. "He's not a theoretician; he's a practitioner."

That's a little maddening if you're trying to locate a consistent philosophy. Haggard was once known for organizing spiritual warfare against territorial spirits. Now he's known for free-market economics.

Haggard is a loyal member of the Religious Right who dials in for a White House conference call every Monday. Yet he embraces ecological concerns and says the Supreme Court made a good decision in the Lawrence v. Texas case, ordering the government out of the private lives of homosexuals.

Haggard thinks churches should keep their doctrinal distinctives to themselves, but he broadcasts political stands that some NAE members find objectionable. (When he produced a memo last spring listing "judicial restraint" at the top of the NAE's priorities and "care for creation" at the bottom, the NAE board made clear they didn't share his priorities.) Talking with Haggard, it isn't entirely clear why politics should be argued in public, but doctrine shouldn't.

Haggard isn't searching for perfect consistency. He is attracted to what works. For him, everything seems to work these days. He loves to drop names of the politicians and journalists who have called. But he's not stuck on politics. Should the political scene change and his influence wane, he would move on to the next thing.

In Haggard, one can see the new confidence of American evangelicalism. Previously consigned to the margins of respectable society, today's evangelicals are on a roll. Those like Haggard enjoy their newfound influence and haven't paused to sort out a philosophy of cultural engagement. They're too busy making a difference.

But personality-driven and media-centric organizations don't necessarily develop strong institutional foundations. Politicians are notoriously fickle. Today's darlings are tomorrow's has-beens.

And as the Bible amply warns, success is seductive. Haggard's optimistic evangelicalism could become self-congratulatory religion-lite, baptizing the American way. It could turn evangelicalism into the church wing of the Republican Party. It could wrap free-market individualism around the Cross, confusing material wealth and personal happiness with spiritual riches. It could neglect the Cross altogether. The new evangelicalism that Haggard represents suffers such temptations, most obviously in the prosperity gospel.

What Is the Wealth For?

For Haggard, however, the ease and wealth of America is only a means to an end. "God's salvation plan isn't just about us," he says. "God's salvation plan is about us participating in his plan for the world. Thus, deny yourself, take up your cross, follow him.

"How do we respond to the people who are not persuaded by our message? We are responsible to make their lives better. tells us that we are supposed to be a blessing to the world, even if they don't respond. Maybe even especially if they don't respond.

"We are responsible to help them, to serve them, to provide a community and a society and a culture that they can live in. That is the only way I can survive the concerns being raised now by secularists, that we may want a theocracy. I argue that's not why we're involved. We have a responsibility to serve everybody. Our own interests are not our interests, because we're here for them."

Such talk leaves doubters nervous. Theocrats often see themselves as beneficent. In Haggard's case, the concern is muted by his love of dialogue, his enjoyment of difference, his genuine friendliness. He likes living in a pluralistic society. All he asks is a chance to speak his piece freely.

"We need to hear multiple voices in order to adjust our attitudes about things that are not absolutes," Haggard says. "We shouldn't shy away from discussions on substantive issues. We are citizens. We need to think and to let others think. We need the best ideas. We are the church. We have a responsibility to 6 billion people."

- 30 -

Tim Stafford is a senior writer for CT.
Copyright © 2005 Christianity Today.

Related Elsewhere:

Harper's Magazine's piece on Ted Haggard, Soldiers of Christ is available online.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Paul Nussbaum article on Haggard is also available online.

Haggard's website has more info on his books, beliefs, and biography.

New Life Church offers mp3 sermons and more information for visitors.

The NAE website has more information about the organization, it's government affairs office, and other news.

The Association of Life-Giving Churches, New Life's church network, has the goal of seeing "churches, no matter their denomination, age or style of worship, promote and facilitate freedom of operation for the Holy Spirit."

CT interviewed Haggard after his election as president of NAE:

Ted Haggard: 'This Is Evangelicalism's Finest Hour' | The new president of the National Association of Evangelicals talks about the current state and future goals of the association and evangelicalism. (June 3, 2003)

Articles on our site by Haggard include:

Decalogue Debacle | What we can learn from a monument now locked in an Alabama closet. By Ted Haggard (April 12, 2004)

Life vs. Law | Your preaching can inspire graceful or grudging obedience. by Ted ard, from Leadership Journal, Fall 2002

U.S. Senator John Kerry: John Wayne and John Lennon rolled into one

The Washington Post (Washington DC USA)
Wednesday 1 November 2006

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Posted by: jameskpolka
November 1, 2006 02:24 PM
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He's a stupid and an addled sort of a person.

Though he had the finest education -- American and Swiss -- money can buy, he reeks of the lazy preppie who knows his future will be smooth and easy, and so never felt compelled to do the hard work to master any difficult subject. Public service has never changed that mindset.

I'd challenge Kerry's most obsessive worshipper to quote one sentence Kerry ever spoke or wrote which deserves being chiseled in stone. From his mouth have come decades of the most forgettable and insubstantial blather.

What the physicist said about a new theory is what you can say about Kerry's Collected Speeches and Writings: "It's not even wrong."

I live in Massachusetts, but I never voted for the guy.

I voted against opponents who would have been worse.

It's scary to believe he would have made a better president than the guy we have now. That doesn't speak to Bush and Kerry -- it speaks to the entire pool of top-tier political talent and intellect in America, their ability to think, their ability to communicate ideas, their ability to inspire people.

Kerry -- who spends more on his hair than I spend to keep my truck on the road, including insurance -- Simonized an image for himself from old photos of John F. Kennedy.

It was easy to want to vote for Kennedy. It was easy to want to follow him -- into the Peace Corps, into space. Once he led us to the brink of nuclear war, we followed with fear and dread -- but nobody criticized his brain or leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When it ended, Americans kept or even increased their confidence in Kennedy's leadership.

It was easy to listen to his speeches, and it's been easy to remember his words.

Regardless of who actually wrote them. If anybody's in an equal position to hire great speechwriters, it's Kerry -- but he doesn't even have the wit to spend his money on competent speechwriters. This week's dopiness is typical of what's spilled out of a mouth people have every right to conclude is dumb and confused.

Kerry was a silly war hero, who learned odd, confused lessons from a silly war. He wanted voters to think of him simultaneously as an aggressive Communist-killing combat warrior for America, and as a dedicated antiwar activist -- John Wayne and John Lennon rolled into one.

That's hard for a single voter to grok in a single human brain at the same time. Kerry's Vietnam legacy is every bit what you'd expect the Vietnam legacy of a rich, privileged preppie temporarily forced into uniform would be.

When a White House guest praised his war heroism, Kennedy replied (ad lib, no writer): "It was involuntary. They sank my boat."

Though rich and privileged, every real veteran laughed and connected. They saw a real American hero -- a guy who does his job, but never went out of his way to win medals. A hero with a healthy, sane focus on surviving, for himself and for all the men he commanded.

Kerry -- what was on his mind in his Swift Boat year? Whatever it was, it was odd, fuzzy, unfocused. He wanted his War Hero ticket punched for future ambitions. He wanted rugged, grinning photos of himself with his combat crew like the WWII Pacific photos that had worked such magic for Kennedy.

Yeah, Kerry consistently gets my vote. That's political leadership in America this season. That's the talent pool.

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The Washington Post (Washington DC USA)
Wednesday 1 November 2006

Early Warning
William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Sen. Kerry Gets Stuck in Iraq

by William M. Arkin

If anyone is proof positive that a good education has nothing to do with being stuck in Iraq, it's John Kerry. The Massachusetts senator removed the silver spoon from his mouth just long enough to insert foot, bobbing and weaving his way through a scandal that delights the talk shows and blogs.

Appearing in Pasadena on behalf of California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, Kerry quipped to a crowd of students: "You know, education -- if you make the most of it -- you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

America is stuck in Iraq, but earth to Kerry, no American is stuck in Iraq. There isn't a draft anymore.

The "being stuck" remark reminds me that if there's any one reason why the stiff and out-of-touch Kerry lost the 2004 presidential election, it is that Mr. National Security is stuck in his own Vietnam past.

Kerry, who has to amplify and defend and explain his remarks against a digital onslaught only too happy to have a nice diversion a week before elections, is swearing his allegiance to the troops.

His having to do so against a Republican backdrop of defense is the ultimate display of Democratic party weakness. No amount of explaining from Kerry will shift the debate to who put the troops in harm's way, who promised mission accomplished and then didn't deliver or who says today that we should do this and that to fight the enemy and then does little to turn words into deeds.

Rhetorically, we could ask who insults the troops more, but for now Kerry knocked himself out. It is another reminder that he is not viable presidential material.

But do volunteer troops need all this protection and defending? I say no, and perhaps if we put the Vietnam/draft notion behind us, not only could we better describe what they do need, but also honestly face our own willingness to be so cavalier with other people's lives.

"The senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful," President Bush said in Georgia, seizing on Kerry's remarks. "The members of the United States military are plenty smart and plenty brave, and the senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology."

Kerry at first dismissed his remarks as a "botched joke" meant to be about president and his people -- what, they Cheney and Rumsfeld are high school drop-outs?

Kerry then said that it was the president and a Congressional Congress who owned the troops an apology for "rubber stamping ... policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families."

Finally Kerry released a statement: "If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did."

Kerry says he has no intention of apologizing. "As a combat veteran, I know the dedication, integrity and commitment of American troops," he said. "Had George Bush and Dick Cheney been in combat one minute of their comfortable lives they would never have sent American troops to war without body armor or without a plan to win the peace and they wouldn't be exploiting our troops today."

Body armor? A plan to win the peace? What are you saying senator? That you would have supported the war had there been an abundance of body armor and a "plan"?

Military sociologists will no doubt trot out statistics about all of those Masters' degrees among the officer class, proving that the military is just as educated as the rest of society.

I suppose others will accuse me of "Swift Boating" Kerry myself. A campaign of allegations about his heroism figured prominently in the 2004 Kerry-Bush race.

But the truth is, for whatever reason, Kerry is stuck in his veteran's uniform with very little else to say. Bush and Cheney are to criticized for failing to serve (or in the case of Bush, for failing to serve in as difficult a position). They are to be condemned for the "comfortable lives."

This is a bit of a Captain Queeg moment for Kerry -- I veteran, defending the downtrodden and hungry against despicable non-veterans.

In other words, the Kerry mindset is that the soldiers must be uneducated to serve in Iraq, and thus need his leadership to get out. What is more, Kerry seems to believe in his heart that only a veteran can claim the right to lead and defend the troops, a kind of military club dictatorship that has no place in American society.

Civilians lead the military, Sen. Kerry, and whether he is a weekend warrior National Guard civilian in George W. Bush who served to avoid an unpleasant war or some fairy tale civilian who has never even wanted to wear the uniform, our system is enshrined in civilian leadership over a subordinate military.

The notion that only Kerry or his combat wounded ilk are qualified to speak to, or on behalf of the troops, is politically dangerous and insulting. I for one don't like Kerry for the very reason that he can't quit shoving his military experience 40 years ago into our faces. I fear that he has learned all of the wrong lessons and would impose a Kerry club litmus test for national security. What is more, I fear he misunderstands that today's military realities don't demand the hundreds of thousands of troops once needed to fight, the kind of military characteristic of his ancient draftee force. Perhaps this explains why Kerry's easy answer to Iraq and other military challenges is more troops!

By William M. Arkin
November 1, 2006; 8:25 AM ET