US a Christian Nation?

We have all encountered people who claim that the United States was founded to be a "Christian Nation," that the founders were born-again Christians, and that any resistance to the agenda of the evangelicals trying to establish a theocracy today is thus a violation of the founders' intent. We know this is nonsense, but it's often hard to come up with convincing contrary evidence on the spot. Here's a terrific web page, provided by "Archiving Early America," with documented quotations from and references to what the founders actually said and wrote.

One excellent and useful example, from the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams and ratified by the United States Senate in 1797: "the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." Can it be any clearer than that?

McCain and Bush

Here's the picture we want every American voter to have in mind, every minute of the day, until the first Tuesday in November.

John McCain

It looks pretty certain that John McCain will be the Republican nominee, so it's time for progressives to get ready to counter the media's shameless love affair (see here) with him. People who should know better say they like him because he seems to talk straight and because he doesn't play the familiar political games. He does occasionally appear a bit different from the run-of-the-mill white guys in suits that run this country, but when it comes to policy--the things he stands for--he's just another Republican who's spent most of the last seven years kissing George Bush's ass.

It's time to start getting some truly straight talk about this guy, who, if elected, will give us, in fact, the third term of the Bush-Cheney administration.

Just a few minutes of googling turns up all sorts of things that the McCain campaign will not want voters to be thinking about, come November.

The North Carolina Democratic Party has a nice web page, with some telling McCain statements. Here's one you might want to have ready at your family Labor Day picnic when your republican cousin starts gushing about McCain (h/t jj):

After the start of the Iraq war, McCain praised President Bush for his leadership and said, "I think the president has led with great clarity and I think he's done a great job leading the country." Asked if he thought the president exaggerated the case for war, McCain said, "I don't think so."

Even better is Joshua Holland's essay at Alternet. Holland reminds us that McCain has said that it's fine with him if American troops stay in Iraq for a hundred years, and he claims the "surge" is working--this despite the mountains of evidence (well outlined in Holland's piece) that it is anything but the success the Republicans and their compliant friends in the press insist it is.

In the matter of the war and so much else, McCain is a Bush Republican. If the Democratic Party has any sense at all (always uncertain), it should shout to the sky, endlessly, "If you liked George W. Bush, you'll LOVE John McCain."