Quote-in-quote “Faith”
Sometimes I see a news magazine cover and feel stupider for seeing it.
I have noted in the past the design trick that Time Magazine has developed — Time Magazine has discovered it could stand out on the newstand by having a stark image against a white backdrop.
The blurb promises a story, a story which I am fairly confident could have been used for the past decades — but our politics has this weird way of running around in circles. “They ignored the faithful for decades. Now Clinton, Obama, and Edwards want to level the playing field.”
Counting decades, I will go back three decades.  That is Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Jimmy Carter. Enough said. Actually Carter almost represents the reversal of this circle we have been running in. Bill Clinton. Any number of incarnations of Bill Clinton focused in and refocused in on “faith”. And how did he phrase his big apology? “I have sinned.”
Reading the article, the problem comes in from one of these “religious advisors”, as well as Hillary Clinton herownself, that the “Faith needs to sound sincere.” I note for the record that Howard Dean never much mentioned his faith until the drumbeat from some source on high, seeming to thunder down from the Drudge Report, forced him to sort of awkwardly wander into Jimmy Carter’s congregation, and toss out a few insincere-sounding words on that nebulous topic. I note too the cunundrum that John Kerry was thrown in — the Catholic Church hiearchy seemed to have it in for him, and I encountered one rather jarring secularist (“Hardcore Agnostic” he called himself — an oxymoron, but never mind) base part of his anti-Kerry bias on the fact that he was a Catholic — at odds with his religion’s bosses. (I fixed his wagon on that stupid point by pointing out this historical irony in relation to what Alfred Smith and John Kennedy went through.) I also saw that Hunter Thompson clone from Rolling Stone magazine throw the couple of sentences on faith out of a wry article that posited his acceptance speech as “BS”, because Kerry isn’t religious — unlike Bush. Maybe; maybe not. But the former regularly attended church and the latter doesn’t.
Beyond that, there is some excuriacting for not buying into “Faith Based Initiatives”. And thus is borne a new bill of goods for a new Bi-Partisan Consensus.
I will now scour the nation for a good atheist to elect as president. Can we do so? If not, can we also maybe elect a firmly implanted northerner, with a jab from a Southern state or two? (Wait. The Republicans have us snooked on that one. Giuliani. Romney. It figures.)