TEA PARTY Remedial Education: Jeeeee-SAHS Made Walker Do IT!

Ye old diabetic farts in yer three-point hats ever stop to THINK CRITICALLY about why the Founding Fathers insisted on a "wall of separation" (Jefferson's words) between church and state? Well, for starters, their forbears settled in this country to escape religious persecution  —  STATE  RELIGION.  Secondly, they were acutely aware of the abuses committed by government in the name of religion, and wanted no part of it. Now we learn where Wisconsin Gov. Walker's authoritarian impulse comes from; he never listened to the people because he believes he answers to a higher authority.

Walker, who was raised by a Baptist preacher, gave a talk to the "Christian Businessman's Committee" in Madison in 2009 in which he confessed his fundamentalist religious beliefs:

“I said, ‘Lord, I’m ready . . . not just in front of my Church and the world but most importantly at the foot of your Throne, I’m ready to follow you each and every day. . . . I have just full out there said, ‘I’m going to trust in you Christ to tell me where to go. And to the best of my ability I’m going to obey where you lead me,’ and that has made all the difference in the world to me, for good times and bad.”

Walker said that God has told him what to do every step of the way, including about what jobs to take, whom to marry, and when to run for governor.

When he had first met his wife, he said, “That night I heard Christ tell me, ‘This is the person you’re going to be with.’ ”

He said he was trusting and obeying God when he took a job at IBM and then at the Red Cross. ““Lord, if this is what you want, I’ll try it,” he said. It was all about “trust and obey.”

He added: “God had a plan further down the road. Little did I know I just had to trust in Christ and obey what he calls me to do and that was going to work out.”

Fourteen months later, at his inaugural prayer breakfast, Walker said, “The Great Creator, no matter who you worship, is the one from which our freedoms are derived, not the government.”

Walker’s views disturb Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

“It is frightening that the highest executive in our state suffers from the delusion that God dictates his every move,” she says. “Consider the personal and historic devastation inflicted by fanatics who think they are acting in the name of their deity.”  

There's no reasoning or compromise with someone who believes his actions are being directed by God and therefore he answers to no one, including the wishes of his constituents. Essentially, that's the  leadership profile of a theocrat, precisely the type of government the Founding Fathers wanted to guard against. Thomas Paine, whose memory has been highjacked and distorted by Teabaggers and Beck, was a progressive, a LIBERAL by today's definition. Or by the Teabagger definition, a SOCIALIST. Paine wrote in The Age of Reason, selected excerpts:

"I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

"The opinions I have advanced… are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues-and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter."

"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is none more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory in itself, than this thing called Christianity."

It's ironic that if Paine were around today he would very likely be contemptuous of the Teabaggers and Wisconsin Governor Walker. Faced with Walker's power grab, in violation of the wishes of the governed citizens of Wisconsin, Paine would have said this:

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary  evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

When he wrote these words, Paine had in mind a petulant, arrogant dictator like Walker, on a grander colonial scale. Not the nonsense spouted by Teabaggers and libertarians about getting government out of the way to allow rich and powerful corporate monopolies to rule without checks and balances. Paine quite clearly explained where he stood:

"Government and the people do not in America constitute distinct bodies"

"And therefore it is to the good of the whole, as well as to the interest of the individual, that every one, who can, sets himself down to his business, and contributes his quota of taxes as one of the first duties he owes to his family, to himself, and to his country."

We remind the Teabaggers of this all the time. What's all this talk about a "tyrannical government"? WE, THE PEOPLE, ARE THE GOVERNMENT! There's no more stark an illustration of this principle than the popular uprising in Wisconsin against Walker, the dictatorial governor. The people of Wisconsin are solidly opposed to what he is doing and they are taking action to recall their government and undo Walker's hideous anti-union, anti-democratic law. The second paragraph of Paine's (above) is as succinct a statement of LIBERAL VALUES as there is, Teabaggers. Read it and weep.

Oh and by the way, Teabaggers: That great EVIL in your minds, Social Security, guess who first proposed it. And guess how he intended to pay for it. (Maybe that's why John Boehner can't stop crying.) The truth hurts, don't it? FOOLS.

But how can I forget ... what THE HELL would you Teabaggers know about history when your CAUCUS LEADER in Congress FAILS BASIC FIFTH GRADE HISTORY: