Enemy within

J. Thomas Duffy at the Reaction calls it the night of the jackal. I hope someday if we're not forbidden by BB to discuss it, we don't look back and call it the night when freedom died. It's hard to get my mind off of the Congressional sellout that allows Bush unlimited power whenever he decides he needs it. It's hard not to associate it with the directives that allow him to seize your assets if you get in the way of his Iraq agenda and that allow him to declare himself supreme ruler for as long as he deems necessary. It's hard not to see liberty and justice slipping silently and invisibly away like water over polished marble slabs.

Remember when Bush told us he didn't trust government - he trusted the people? Perhaps as Duffy says, the lion sleeps tonight, but the lyin' never stops.

Still, it's important to remember that even if President Bush is the greatest enemy of our constitution since King George III of England, there are other enemies demented and domestic that pursue a relentless process of undermining what is left of the promise of liberty. They send me e-mail almost every day. Saturday evening brought me a very impassioned note showing a picture of the face of the Washington one dollar coin with the huge headline displayed in red letters:

YOU GUESSED IT 'IN GOD WE TRUST' IS GONE

After a fabricated story about having picked up some of these gold tone coins at the bank and the shock, the horror at discovering the omission of that Ten Commandment defying motto, I'm asked again in huge letters: "

"Who originally put In God We Trust onto our currency? My guess is that it was one of the presidents on these coins. All our US government has done is dishonor them, and disgust me!!! Together we can force them out of circulation. Please send to all on you [sic] e-mail list. I am personally offended and fed up with the denigration of God and Christianity in my country. I am certain George Washington would never have agreed to his picture on the coin if it any way diminished faith in God. "

Of course the guess is wrong and he may be certain but he's certainly wrong about Washington. He would have done no such thing, being a Deist and not a Christian believing in a personal or monetary God and having exhibited no particular urge to establish a religion in defiance of the Constitution during his lifetime and there not having been any religious message on any of our coinage prior to 1864. We can be sure he's not rolling in his grave at the moment. It's also a bit odd to say that faith is promoted (albeit in rampant defiance of the Bill of Rights and the stated intentions of those who wrote it) by slogans on money. But of course the whole thing is rendered hilariously moot by the fact that the motto does indeed appear around the edge of the coin. The perpetrator is of course lying for the Lord and at full throttle.

Perhaps the outraged author is ignorant enough not to know that the initial appearance of 'In God we Trust' was on the two cent coin in 1864 and was part of the attempt to assign a religious mission to the Northern side in the Civil War. It was added at the behest of the Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Most people would probably fall for the fabrication:

"The new George Washington $1.00 coin is the first money ever issued by the USA in modern history without the words "In God We Trust". By omitting these words, our politically correct, secularist leaders made a conscientious decision that either; 1) God does not exist, or 2) that God exists, but can no longer be trusted. "

but fabrication it is. It was only from 1938 on that all coins bore the motto and the first paper money to bear it was issued in 1957.

Since it's nearly impossible for anyone to be quite as stupid as the writer of this e-mail appears to be, I can only conclude that it's another attempt by the Christianist Jihad to undermine truth, justice, the monetary system and the American Way. So perhaps by pointing to the correct history and by reading the overtly secularist constitution, I've become a politically correct secularist leader. I'm not actually sure what that means, but I do think it's better to be correct than incorrect with respect to the facts and better to tell the truth than to be a liar, even if it's a liar for the advancement of Christian supremacy.