ANOTHER STINKIN' TWOFER

Yes, my busy, hectic, crazy week continues. In fact, I'm posting this meager excerpt and "click here" post in the Reilly Theatre's business office during intermission for our pay-what-you-can preview of She Stoops to Conquer. I've got work to do later tonight. So, anyway, here's a couple of essays, both via WorkingForChange, both by the Washington Post's liberal columnist EJ Dionne. Check it out:

Rumsfeld the scapegoat

But that's also the point: For all his mistakes, Rumsfeld is not some alien creature operating as a loner sabotaging the otherwise reasonable policies of his bosses. President Bush is the commander-in-chief. Vice President Cheney is on record as having made outlandishly optimistic predictions before the war started about how swimmingly everything would go.

Rumsfeld is Bush's guy, which is why the president resists firing him. Letting Rumsfeld go would amount to acknowledging how badly the administration has botched Iraq.

Indeed, the rebellious generals have not confined their criticism to the secretary of defense. In his powerful article last week in Time magazine, Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold was sweeping in saying that “the zealots' rationale for war made no sense.” That was zealots, plural. He also said that our forces were committed to this fight “with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions — or bury the results.” Does anyone doubt to whom those words “casualness” and “swagger” refer?

Click here for more.

The comeback of Judas

The buzz surrounding the Gospel of Judas is that it will threaten the faith. Much the same has been said of “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown, but the Judas Gospel has the additional benefit of being a genuine historical document. It is the product of the Gnostic movement, a wing of early Christianity, eventually condemned as heretical -- that claims salvation not by faith or works, but by special knowledge.

As Marvin Meyer, a biblical scholar at Chapman University, points out in a helpful essay in the National Geographic volume that includes the Judas Gospel, the “knowledge claimed by these people is not worldly knowledge but mystical knowledge, knowledge of God and self and relationship between God and self.”

Judging by the Gospel of Judas, the “knowledge” claim of the book's author or authors is to a rather bizarre cosmology. The detailed description of a divine realm of assorted angels and an emphasis on the stars -- “stop struggling with me,” the Jesus of the story says, “each of you has his own star” -- reads like a rejected screenplay for a Spielberg movie.

Click here for the rest.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$