Ground Hog primary

So we have another source of wisdom and another voice to add to the panel of sages, prophets and certainty sellers we've been inflicted with late and soon. The latest party guest of the Mad Hatter, Christine O’Donnell, told Bill Maher some years ago when the Biblemongers began to suck the blood out of lurid school shooting reportage, that it was all because there wasn't enough Bible study and prayer in our schools. Same old, same old.

It's not that she's the first to link random occurrences with public sin for the purpose of profit. In fact it seems to be the world's oldest profession, but fools that some of us are, we've grown to expect that things like lightening and tornadoes are the inevitable and random results of natural processes and it isn't witches, homosexuals, believers in alternate mythologies and the tolerance of the same who cause them. It was the 90's and nearly every thing possessed of a name could be advanced with the banner "no wonder kids kill kids." It was America where we never make the connection between child molesting, whore humping clerics, Reverend Jones, the Waco whacko, David Koresh and Bible study.

Our world is full of forces enticing kids and adults to kill others as well as being full of tectonic events, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and falling bits of space rock. There simply is no correlation with religious devotion, adherence or piety. It's also worth noticing that holy books are so often cited as a reason and justification for unjust and irrational behavior. The Bible belt is more than roughly congruent with various other belts of things from ignorance and bigotry to bad dental hygiene and Churches are as likely if not more likely to be hit by lightning as houses of prostitution, opium dens, gambling casinos and Mosques.

But candidates Like Palin, O'Donnel and Robertson still win elections, don't they. They still thrive on telling us about witches and heretics and the dreaded libertine liberals as the country slides so far toward the holy right that even Bush and his high father begin to be called liberals. Same old.