Manchurian candidate.

So much for Mr. Obama.  I used to dig him, but it’s all over now.  Democrats must court evangelicals, says he and even though our Constitution scrupulously avoids any mention and forbids official acknowledgement of God or gods or any group claiming authority derived from invisible powers, he thinks the party must compete for their support.  

"Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation. Context matters," he said to a religious group: Call to Renewal.  Indeed it does and one context in which I deem and the writers of the constitution deemed inappropriate was the context of the Federal Government and its laws.

Frankly, though he is correct that religion plays a large part in the individual lives of Americans, I fail to see that as a mandate for the legislature and the courts to get involved in our personal mythologies any more than they should get involved in other important things we hold dear, like our family relationships and our love lives and all our private matters.

"It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase `under God,” he continued. Perhaps that’s because he believes in God and thinks everyone else should too. I was embarrassed to have to say it in 1954 and I refuse to say it now as do many who have actually read the Ten Commandments and the constitution and take one or the other seriously.

In truth, if the world’s biggest generator of waste and the largest den of corruption and imperial lawlessness since Caligula’s term as emperor of Rome is to be involved in matters of private conscience simply because such matters exist, then why not recognize all the myriad concerns from bigotry to baseball by courting support?  After all, the Aryan Nation is a religious group acknowledging the same God as other Christians and so does the KKK.  I don’t notice the Junior Senator from Illinois advocating for the official mention of Krishna or Allah or Vishnu, Wauconda, Legba, shri Ganesh, Amitaba or Baron Samedi and these are just a few of the deities dear to the hearts of American citizens. The Nazi party is faith based and so is al Qaeda. Sometimes it doesn’t take much reductio to get to the absurdem part, does it?

We don’t do this; we don’t recognize any establishment of religion because that would require government to say this religion is good and that religion is bad and because that would be the end of religious freedom, the constitution forbids this.  Barak Obama is a very intelligent and very educated man and I don’t have any evidence that he is corrupt, so I can only assume that, speaking of brainwashing, his failure to recognize the obvious is an artifact of some other process.  Should we look for a small scar on his shoulder?