The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel and in Africa have hijacked Christmas.

This year, the national media hardly ever mentions Christmas , nor does the local media, with the exception of telling us where to deposit our canned food. And even those one minute advertisements only appeared three times.

It may be just as well, since Christ would probably not want to have anything to do with our warmongering psyche. It appears that Christ is removing his energy of good will and peace until we come to our senses.

Mearchants are already complaining that people are not spending enough, which is a good thing as far as I am concerned.

I heard that there is a movie on TV where Santa  takes a year off and does not appear. Forget about Santa, Christ does not want to appear as well, as long as we slaughter each other.

This talk was given at the LRC Health and Wealth Conference in Foster City, California, December 2, 2006.

With the Democrats taking charge in Congress, we will surely hear talk of mandatory national health insurance, more spending for health care for the poor and elderly, and more taxes on individuals and business to pay for the whole scheme. This is admittedly not that different from what Republicans have been doing since taking over. In some ways, Republicans are even worse, driving us to socialism in the name of market reform and other sloganeering. Either way, we are stuck with a system that is moving the health sector ever more into the hands of the state.

In January of 1970 the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent called a 21-year-old pre-theology student at Oberlin College, Bill Schulz, to supply our pulpit.

Despite his youth and long hair Bill was an accomplished preacher, socially and politically mature. He moved easily among the 60-odd largely academic and progressive members of a congregation just over 100 years old, founded on the Universalist belief "All souls will be saved."

Our major concerns then were: getting out of Vietnam, ending the draft, and countering repressive federal actions. The church basement was the venue of draft-counseling and meetings of the fledgling Kent Environmental Council. A Saturday night coffeehouse of the local SDS had been closed after the students failed to manage their logistical and financial responsibilities.

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of my naturalization as an American -- going back to 1986 when Ronald Reagan was the acting president, Ollie North was playing rogue missile salesman to Iran and George W. Bush was the family drunk. Technically I've still spent more than half my life as a Lebanese. But technicalities don't apply where the heart is concerned. I took the oath in 1986. I'd really become American, heart and soul, four years earlier.

Are you tired of reading the Bible or one of the other Good Books? Do they not "do anything" for you any more? Well, then, read the Gettysburg Address instead, the real "American Gospel." That’s the message of a new book (The Gettysburg Gospel) by Gettysburg College’s Gabor Boritt, featured recently on the front cover of Newsweek. Never mind that Lincoln himself did not believe in God and even ridiculed those who did. The "American Gospel," as Boritt calls the Gettysburg Address, defines the "religion" of the U.S. government, the "good news of a free people," according to Boritt.

I "foam at the mouth," or so noted a very sweet and technically adept colleague of mine, Kathy Kellie, who volunteered to format my footnotes electronically, before my new book Baseless Conservatism: Making Sense of the American Right, went back to the copyeditor at Macmillan. She noted a persistent habit of mine each time that I describe the modern administrative state reaching for power. "You must be very conservative!" Kathy opined, as she glanced over my corrected footnotes one last time. I retorted that by now I was on the verge of becoming a "rightwing anarchist," in view of the control over social behavior and education that public administrators have taken for themselves even in our lifetimes. (Kathy is only two and half years younger than I and therefore able to remember a time when Americans actually treated our democratic welfare state with a bit more suspicion.)

There's been much talk about the Rumsfeld memo written before his departure, the one that recommended change in the Bush administration's Iraq war policy. But there's been little talk of the strange specifics in the memo, specifics which provide profound insight into the workings of the imperial state. For the naïve among us, here is your education.

In particular, I'm thinking of the following chilling passage:

Near the beginning of his "Travels With Charley," John Steinbeck explains why, at 58, he interrupted his comfortably rich and famous life to make a taxing solo trip across the United States. "I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap," he wrote. "I knew that ten or twelve thousand miles driving a truck, alone and unattended, over every kind of road, would be hard work, but to me it represented the antidote for the professional sick man. And in my own life I am not willing to trade quality for quantity. If this projected journey should prove too much then it was time to go anyway."

"He’s not an ordinary politician. He has strong beliefs."
~ Senator Charles Schumer describing Senator James Webb

"They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind" ~ Hosea 8

President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki met in Jordan to discuss the steadily deteriorating situation in Iraq; neither has faced the reality that as far as controlling future events in Iraq are concerned, both are irrelevant. Bush, like many other factional leaders in Iraq, has his own militia, arguably no longer the largest, but is in the unenviable position of being the one all the others see as occupiers and targets of opportunity. Prime Minister al-Maliki has nothing but his status as a puppet for the most hated entity currently involved in the debacle that is Iraq.

In reality, Bush lost whatever control of events he had in Iraq somewhere between "Mission Accomplished" and "Bring Them On."