Tuesday, November 22, 2011
The Antichrist
By way of disclaimer, I have not read the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the last book in the Bible, and the source of such beliefs as the Antichrist, the rapture, the final fight between right and wrong, and all that. I have to make up my own definition of the term "Antichrist." Here it is:
So, what is this Antichrist up to? He has persuaded a significant fraction of us that the number one problem is the size and the expense of the federal government. To achieve moral purity, we must put aside all these expensive entitlements, like social security, medicare, unemployment insurance and compensation, environmental regulations, and the like, and reduce taxes. Taxes are too high, they must come down. We must go back to the nineteenth century, when there was no income tax and when the only functions of the federal government was maintaining a safe currency, running the postal service, and clearing the western lands of the ignorant and worthless natives who lived there and made problems for the white settlers.
Who is this Antichrist and how has he obtained so much power? He has power, no doubt. He has made it impossible for our elected representatives in Congress to address the problems of unemployment and a weak economy. Instead, they are compelled to quarrel over how to reduce the deficit without raising taxes. He has caused nearly every Republican member of Congress to sign a pledge not to vote for any tax increase regardless of any consequences. He has vowed to reduce the size of the federal government until it is like a baby that could be drowned in the bathtub.
This man has been exposed in television interviews several times. The most recently aired interview was with Mike Croft last Sunday on the CBS program Sixty Minutes. I thought Mike did a good job of exposing the man's intentions for all us to see. The man's name? Grover Norquist.
I have a candidate for an Antichrist who is living among us this very day. This person is persuading some of us to believe and act in ways that are very harmful to our country and by extension to ourselves and our descendants. We know that our country has an ailing economy. Unemployment is high. Jobs are scarce and becoming scarcer as more and more of them are being moved to China and other low-wage countries. We have a negative trade balance which causes foreign countries to use the dollars they receive from us for our purchases to buy our bonds. We know in our gut that the poor economy is the number one problem we face as a nation.I believe an Antichrist (oh, there must be many of them, like antipopes) is a person who masquerades among us pretending to be the true Christ and telling us things that we, or some of us, believe to be extensions of the teachings of the real Christ. All the time this mountebank is influencing us to do things that are very harmful and perhaps even fatal to us and seducing us to believe things that are in fact the exact opposite of the teachings of the true Christ.
So, what is this Antichrist up to? He has persuaded a significant fraction of us that the number one problem is the size and the expense of the federal government. To achieve moral purity, we must put aside all these expensive entitlements, like social security, medicare, unemployment insurance and compensation, environmental regulations, and the like, and reduce taxes. Taxes are too high, they must come down. We must go back to the nineteenth century, when there was no income tax and when the only functions of the federal government was maintaining a safe currency, running the postal service, and clearing the western lands of the ignorant and worthless natives who lived there and made problems for the white settlers.
Who is this Antichrist and how has he obtained so much power? He has power, no doubt. He has made it impossible for our elected representatives in Congress to address the problems of unemployment and a weak economy. Instead, they are compelled to quarrel over how to reduce the deficit without raising taxes. He has caused nearly every Republican member of Congress to sign a pledge not to vote for any tax increase regardless of any consequences. He has vowed to reduce the size of the federal government until it is like a baby that could be drowned in the bathtub.
This man has been exposed in television interviews several times. The most recently aired interview was with Mike Croft last Sunday on the CBS program Sixty Minutes. I thought Mike did a good job of exposing the man's intentions for all us to see. The man's name? Grover Norquist.
Labels: Grover Norquist, Mike Croft, Sixty Minutes
