GETTING AFTER JESUS FOR BAD POLITICS

Statue of Saddam Hussein - one of 4 million innocents allegedly killed by the Bush administration.

On August 22 some twit named @dandunx1 tweeted this to me: @aimlessjonah Where were you while Bush killing [sic] 4 million innocent people in Iraq?Where were the Vatican&Jesus?Tea Party?

Nothing would please me more than to engage @dandunx1 in some intelligent dialog online, but his Twitter account has been suspended. No reason was given, but I suspect unrestrained personal attacks and anger management issues are at the heart of it.

I'd be especially interested to learn where @dandunx1 gets his information. What he thinks he knows is so deliciously wrong on so many levels it is comical...if dangerously so. I find it interesting that someone who takes matters like this so seriously that he feels compelled to comment online to someone he does not know, would not bother to vet the salient points of his argument.

I'll grant that there is and has been a lot of reasonable opposition to the war in Iraq. I for one supported the effort to throw down Saddam Hussein, and I continue to do so in spite of the much demonstrated lack of weapons of mass destruction and any real links between Hussein's regime and Al Queda. There are many however who think that I am wrong in this, and they have very good reasons for thinking so, not the least of which would be the much demonstrated lack of weapons of mass destruction and any real links between Hussein's regime and Al Queda.

No one with the good sense to articulate reasonable opposition however, thinks that 4 million innocent Iraqis were killed in the conflict. 4 million would represent something over 10 percent of Iraq's total population of 38 million. There is no way possible that this number of people went killed or missing without some global alarm being raised. To believe one tenth of this number would be stupid. To believe 4 million is ludicrous.

@dandunx1 seems to want to implicate the Vatican, Jesus and the Tea Party in this travesty. It's bad enough that he holds George Bush personally responsible for every alleged death. After all it took a lot of complicity to get us where we are today, and George Bush never exhibited the kind of monolithic charismatic leadership to have accomplished this kind of carnage all by himself. Blaming the Vatican, however, shows a singular disregard for historical fact.

The fact is that the Vatican, under both Pope John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, expressed repeated opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the pursuit of war there. This fact is well known and well documented. I don't know how @dandunx1 has the brass to make such an accusation without at least trying to Google it to see if he had a leg to stand on. He did not. He does not, and now he's all apoplectic about something that isn't even true.

I think it's reasonable to assume that, if the Vatican was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, so was Jesus. I know there are a lot of people who don't think that the Vatican and Jesus are in sync on every issue, but anyone who has read scripture with a critical eye to what was on Jesus' mind, has to allow that He was all about peace. Still, just what @dandunx1 expected Jesus to do about it in this particular instance is kind of a mystery. Jesus has been largely absent on the global political scene for some 2,000 years while those who profess to believe in Him and those who insist that He is a phantom of superstition work in concert to hold the world on the brink of ruin. Whatever @dandunx1 thinks happened in Iraq, Jesus didn't have anything to do with it.

Neither did the Tea Party. The Tea Party is not in sync with Jesus or the Vatican on every issue. The Tea Party is kind of an enigma, comprised as it is of angry crackpots of every stripe. There is much that is good about the Tea Party, as well as much that is completely off the wall. I don't actually know where the Tea Party stands on Iraq. I do know, however, as there was no Tea Party when the war in Iraq started, it would have been exceedingly difficult for them to come up with a cohesive platform. Hell...they can't do that now, when they actually exist.