Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Is God on Our Side?

Listen to today's Radio or Not podcast by clicking here (runtime 21:11)

Apparently, that's what the Bush administration thought! In a stunning new article in GQ Magazine, Bob Draper (author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush) tells us that Bush's famous comment of 9/16/01 in which he referred to the "war on terror" as a "crusade" probably wasn't one of his famous slips at all!

Just a few weeks ago, we learned from an English language Al Jazeera report the evangelical Christians in the US Military were proselytizing in Afghanastan, even going as far as handing out bibles translated into the two languages spoken there.

Now, thanks to Draper's piece, "And He Shall Be Judged," we learn the fundamentalist religious zealotry that we condemn in radical Islam was present at the highest levels of our government!

The article contains a slideshow of cover art from a series of Top Secret reports prepared for President Bush by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, juxtaposing war photos with biblical passages, and were delivered to the president by Rumsfeld himself.

See the slideshow here.

In today's Radio or Not podcast, we go back to May 4 and 5, the days immediately following the Al Jazeera story, for my conversations about that incident with Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, and Mikey Weinstein, founder & president of Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

The song featured on today's podcast is "God on Our Side" by World Party.

Listen to today's Radio or Not podcast by clicking here (runtime 21:11)

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