Devil's Bread

As I was finishing up an article over the weekend, George Bush was finishing up the "budget" for the coming year. How are these two issues related? Well, in my reading, I found two (three really) quotes that are apropos of the 2nd Bush administration. The first is from Reinhold Niebuhr's reaction to the 1952 Republican victory:

In short, the election campaign, taken as a laboratory test, reveals political man as capable of rational analysis of our common fate and of moral estimates of his own and his neighbor's rights. But the rational and moral considerations are in every instance colored by interest and passion. The democratic process is, therefore, not so much a meeting of minds in which the truth prevails, as it is a contest of intersts dominated by the fortuitous circumstance and not by rational argument. Democracy must be regarded, on the one hand, as a system of government which men's rational and moral capacities make possible, and on the other hand, as a system of checks and balances which the corruptions by interest and passion make necessary. For these corruptions as revealed in the campaign are precisely those which make life insufferable in a tyrannical regime and whichare robbed of their virulene by the checks and balances of democracy. (Neibuhr, "The Republican Victory" Reprinted in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr).

As Sojourners editor Jim Wallis is fond of noting, budgets are moral documents. The latest budget by the Bush administration is, in light of that, the most egregiously immoral document to be published by this administration since, well, since the last egregiously immoral document they published. From the perspective of a prophetic Christianity, it violates every mandate of righteousness demanded by Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, and Amos. Far from putting the concerns of the least and the most vulnerable first, it puts them dead last, using a cannard about "effectiveness" as justification, but then offering no plan to come up with more effective policies to aid the impoverished. And it is this that leads to my second quote, from Niebuhr's daughter, Elizabeth Sifton, in her book, The Serenity Prayer:

For the first time in many decades," Pa had confessed, "I feel seriously concerned about the future of this great country, because the two men who seem to be guiding its destiny [Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles] seem both to be stupid. One is amiable and the other not, but the stupidity is equal."

To which Felix Frankfurter replied (per Sifton):

When Reinie speaks of stupidity, reminded him that "Gegen die Dummheit kampfen selbst die Gotter vergebens" [against stupidity eve the gods fight in vain]. And when stupidity is mixed with self-righteousness we have devil's bread.