Politics and ideologues.

I may be accused of being the very thing I detest by virtue of the fact that I'm even writing this entry, but there's been such an overwhelming amount of shit over the past week that I can't ignore it any more.

1) The Gaza Strip pullout: Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, but wasn't this Israeli withdrawal plan basically the same one that Clinton proposed toward the very end of his presidency. Didn't he advise the Israelis to unilaterally pull out of some of the disputed territory as a show of good faith? (Arafat objected to the plan back in 2000, to show you what kind of cloistered lunatic he was.)

Is this why the right is so vehemently against the peace process? Why, despite the actions and motives of the legitimate and elected government in sovereign Israel, do they think that America needs to do more to prevent the pull out from going forward. And why, for the love of Pete, is it such a tragedy that the only Jewish folks left in Gaza right now being pulled out (literally, as I'm writing this) aren't the settlers. No, they've all left already. The only ones left are miscreants who want to do little but cause a ruckus, folks who don't even live there. They've come in from Israel for the sole purpose of... get this...

Throwing acid on Israeli troops charged with removing them.

Yes, according to Jim Clancy (on CNN right now) and his reporter on the ground by the synagogue that's the center of the hubbub today, these outsiders have been dousing the Israeli troops in acid.

The ideologue in me wants to scream, "This is what the conservatives in both countries support!" But I'll refrain.

I can understand, at least from my very-outsider point of view, why the Israeli conservatives don't want to give up the disputed territories. Benjamin Netanyahu is a passionate and well-spoken voice for that movement, and can at least make me sympathetic with his stance, even if I don't agree with it.

The reasoning behind the conservatives in this country, however, completely eludes me. Until, that is, I remember something I saw a couple of months ago.

Dominionism (from Wikipedia). Essentially, this is the argument that because the Old Testament says that God told Adam & Eve (and thus the rest of humanity) to "subdue" the entire earth and everything on it (Genesis 1:28), the Christian fundamentalists have the obligation to do just that. The weird bent here occurs when you look at their goals. The Dominists want to hasten the end of the world. They believe (as far as I can muster any rational understanding of this psychosis at all) that it is their duty as Christians to transform civil government into a theocracy and institute the Old Testament biblical law. All of it. Which is weird because being Christians and all you'd think they'd have latched on to the thing the New Testament said about Jesus fulfilling the old Hebraic Law so that they wouldn't have to worry about all 600+ of them themselves.

As it turns out, they want to worry about them. So much so in fact that they want them instituted as the laws of the United States. All of them. So girls, you're going back to being bargaining chips between potential suitors and the dads who choose them. Want to be a slave? Well, there'll be plenty of opportunities for you to fulfil that ambition. Tired of that pesky trial system we have now? Fear not! They want to do away with that. Most crimes are punishable by death, and the crimes that aren't carry penalties that are solely at the discretion of the accuser. Tired of the neighbor's dog shitting in your lawn and not picking it up? Just have him killed, and his little dog, too.

I'm not making this shit up, folks. And I wouldn't even be talking about it, except that these cults (because that's what they were called in the 1990's) are now in the power seats in this country, or are very nearly in them. And they're all over the place. Just go here or here. Or read more about them here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here.

Point is this: There's a movement that exists high up in the power structure of today's Republican party who want to activate a level of hatred and discrimination in this country, with the end purpose of expediting Jesus' return to Earth. (If that doesn't qualify as hubris, I don't know the meaning of the word.) The only way, according to the Bible, that Jesus can return is if Israel is in control of Jerusalem. And the only way that happens is if Israel dominates the Middle East, and stops doing things like pulling out of Gaza.

There may be some other, strained explanation from conservative wonks, but it boils down to the Dominionists and their vice-like grip on the Republican party.