He who digs a hole and scoops it out falls into the pit he has made. The trouble he causes recoils on himself; his violence comes down on his own head.
           –Psalm 7:15-16

          When President Bill Clinton was at the height of his denial concerning his affair with Monica Lewinsky, pointing at the TV camera and saying, "I... did... not... have... sex... with... that...woman!” I don't know about you, but I was thinking that his own history was not in his favor at that moment.  Whether he was ever actually caught red-handed or not, the sheer volume of previous charges concerning his sexual behavior called his credibility on sexual affairs into doubt, to say the least.  Even if you buy into his specious argument about the definition of "having sex," the fact remained that President Clinton became harder and harder to believe about anything because his credibility was so compromised over l'affaire Lewinsky.
          Bill Clinton seemed to me to represent the Fallen Man; caught in his own web of lies in an affair with a younger woman, he had to painfully come crawling back to his wife and child and ask forgiveness.  The only thing that made this at all interesting is that it was played out on the world stage, and he was, at the time, the most powerful man on earth.  By all accounts, Bill Clinton is a likable man, not unlike Ronald Reagan was, even to his political foes.
          Also, not unlike Reagan and almost every other modern president save Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton would invoke the name of God when it was appropriate, and considered himself a Christian, but could hardly have been called an evangelical Christian, at least by the definition that most people reading this book would go by.  Most presidents, again with the exception of Carter, would give God His due without wearing their religion on their sleeves. (Richard Nixon was supposed to be a Quaker–isn't that ironic?) Until George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter was the most overt president in regards to his Christianity.  I don't remember Carter being as up front about religion when he was in office as our current president is now, but I think that is just a sign of the times.
          Likable or not, while Bill Clinton's credibility with many of the people in his own nation was pretty well shot by 1997, much of the rest of the world shrugged.  Heck, most of the men in power around the world were wondering what the big deal was, while the rest were sighing, “There but for the grace of God go I." When Richard Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate, many of the leaders around the world had a similar reaction.
          When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, although I was not in favor of many of his policies, I was optimistic that the credibility of the Presidency would be restored; being an unabashed evangelical Christian, Bush promised to bring decency and moral values (that slippery phrase), and, although he didn't use these words, a Christian world view to the White House.  If what we were all looking for was a guy who doesn't cheat on his wife, then, although nothing is absolutely certain except death and taxes, I think we can pretty safely say that Dubya has been true to his word.
          When you become a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the reasons for anonymity, especially if you're famous, is that if you tell the world that you're in AA, and then you stand out on your front stoop waving a shotgun at the police with a bottle of Jack Daniels in your other hand (which actually happened with a famous female rock singer), then you give the whole program a bad name and people think that it must not work. Unfortunately, this image hit home with many people around the world–our President metaphorically stood out on the front stoop of the White House with a Bible, and then waved "Shock and Awe" in the world’s face.               When George W. Bush became President and wore the evangelical Christian label on his sleeve, he took on a tremendous responsibility to uphold the faith while in office, a responsibility that proved too hard to bear.  The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they separated Church from State.  When one is waving the Cross as well as the Flag at people from other cultures and faiths, they are given twice as many reasons to want to blow you up.  While Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton may have done some things to make other countries mad, it is George W. who appeared unbelievably hypocritical by adopting a holier-than-thou righteousness about our cause, and then allowed his administration to act in this most un-Christ-like fashion.  This not only hurt our nation, it has set the faith back, too.  The louder he barked about being a Christian, the more Christ-like should have tried to be.  This did not happened.  He was all about revenge, and two-eyes-for-an-eye.  He spent our money on guns rather than poverty.  He's just an ol' fashioned Texas oilman, and if that were all he was, then no one would give him a second thought.  But as the leader of the Free World, and an avowed Christian, he has done immense harm both to the prestige of the United States, and to the Christian religion.  I'm not being overblown about this; look again at the percentages that don't like George Bush's policies among our allies and friends.  And this, following the overwhelming support our nation received in the aftermath of 9/11.  That was The Moment.  If George W. Bush could have risen to the occasion after 9/11 in a truly Christian way, with words evoking Martin Luther King, or C.S. Lewis, or Billy Graham, imagine the world's surprise.  Instead we got the words of a cowboy out of the old West. Vengeance is mine! How un-Christ-like was the behavior of the Bush administration since 9/11.  Once again, I know that governments are secular.  That's fine if your rhetoric is secular.  But George W. Bush invoked the power of Almighty God in our cause while arbitrarily changing international law as he saw fit. He claimed to pray while he detained prisoners without charging them with anything, and allowed them to be tortured.  While thumping his Bible, he invaded a sovereign nation without provocation, causing endless suffering and misery in an attempt to undo suffering and misery (destroying the village in order to save it), and he arbitrarily ignored the parts of the United States Constitution that he didn't care for.
          Like Bill Clinton's previous "bimbo eruptions" made it hard to believe his Monica Lewinsky explanations, this administration, led by the president, had a real credibility problem when it came to anything they said about war, or anything else for that matter.  When Vice President Dick Cheney said that the insurgency in Iraq was "in its last throes," this man lost his credibility.  This is the same guy who said in 1992: "And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney said then in response to his own question, "And the answer is not very damned many.  So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." Continuing on, he then said, "All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques.  Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq." The end result, Cheney said in 1992, would be a messy, dangerous situation requiring a long-term presence by U.S. forces.
          How about these Cheney quotes: "We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators (in Iraq)."–March 16, 2003, to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." On the same show: "We believe he (Saddam) has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. El Baradei (head of the UN Atomic Inspections Team) frankly is wrong." Or this, on August 26, 2002, at the national VFW Convention: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Simply stated, frankly, in fact, in my mind, this man lost his credibility.  
          When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that we had just the right amount of troops in Iraq to complete the mission successfully, despite the repeated objections of the most senior military men on the ground, he had already shot his credibility. "I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won't last any longer than that." Donald Rumsfeld said that.  He also said, "It is easier to get into something than to get out of it." That one, I agree with.  He also said, "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know.  There are known unknowns.  That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns.  These are things we don't know we don't know." I don't even know what that means.
          When the President of the United States, George W. Bush, stood up in the summer of 2005 and continued to link his adventure in Iraq to the tragedy of 9/11 despite all evidence to the contrary, people all over America just began to tune out.  He lost them.  He went to the well one too many times.  Even the die-hards had begun to throw up their hands. Without his credibility, a president will find it almost impossible to lead.


          Even if one accepts the fact that our government, or any government for that matter, is a secular organism, with an almost Darwinian "survival-of-the-fittest" mentality and morality, I still believe it is incumbent upon us as Christ-centered people not to condone their bad behavior.  As much as we pour our hearts and energies into the attempt to counter the secular culture here in our own country by offering the alternative of a life built around the precepts and divinity of Jesus Christ, we cannot ignore the damage that was done in our names and in His name around the world by the hostile, bent-on-revenge-and-world-domination folks we have had running this country.  Is there is anyone on the horizon, be it Democrat or Republican, who is ready to stand on even the secular principles that Jesus brought forth: to love your neighbor as yourself, to turn the other cheek when someone strikes you, to wash the feet of your brother, and that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  These are the very definitions of a small "L" liberal, and no one wants to be caught dead running a political race based on these principals.  So, we end up with Frick versus Frack, two politicians who spend most of their time raising the money they'll need to paint themselves at the farther end of each political spectrum for the Primaries, and then raising even more money to convince the public that they are not really at the far end of any spectrum after all, but solidly and unabashedly centrist.  After the election, the winner can then return to wherever he really stood on the spectrum, counting on the short attention span of the electorate to forget any "distortions or misstatements" said candidate might have made along the road to being elected.
          So what, then, are Christians supposed to do? If there is one point that I wish emphasized in this book, it is that we as Christians need to be Christians first, Americans second, and (Fill in your Party) third.  We have a tremendous opportunity to be radicals for peace, and a truly decisive independent voice in this country, as long as we don't give that chance up by submitting meekly to whatever the conservative politicians and their mouthpieces in the media say.  Your leader is Jesus the Christ, not James the Dobson, or Oliver the North, or Rush the Limbaugh, or even George W. Bush.  If you voted Republican, then I urge you to hold your elected leaders responsible for their actions.
          My two Senators in California are Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, two Democratic women who I voted for the last time they came up for reelection.  Of the two, Boxer is certainly known as a liberal Democrat; Feinstein is more centrist, but would probably be put in the liberal boat with Ms. Boxer nonetheless.  I have let both Senators know that my vote in the next election is dependent on how they use their political power to expose the illegal and immoral actions of our current administration.  If they sit meekly on their hands with their lips buttoned in mortal fear of appearing "soft" on Defense, then I will vote for a third-party candidate who has the guts to stand for what is right. (The smaller candidates do have the freedom to say whatever they want because they know they won't be elected; the major candidates have to tread the fine line of being all things to all people, so they end up being "nothings" to anyone.)

How can you vote for two people who are obviously so... pro-choice?

I say to you again, a life is a life is a life.  If a politician that is pro-life comes out against the death penalty, and against imperialist wars in general and the war in Iraq in particular, then he/she most certainly will get my vote.  If a politician who is pro-life takes a truly pro-life agenda on all world issues, then he/she's got me at hello.  I think it is hypocritical to look at it any other way.  If we are really pro-life, then we are going to support the politician that is going to try and save the most lives and kill the fewest, a politician who is going to view the earth as God's Creation and not ours to use up and destroy, regardless of his or her political affiliation. Again, "There is none righteous; no, not one".