Fiddlers and clowns
by digby
As I wrote earlier, I really liked the way Obama addressed the Trumped up birther nonsense today, especially the part where he wrote that we don’t have time to listen to carnival barkers.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of them in politics these days. Get a load of this, from Sarah Posner
Alabama Republican Robert Aderholt and West Virginia Democrat Nick Rahall have introduced a Congressional Resolution, timed to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, designed to express the body’s “gratitude” for the “influence” the KJV has had on “countless families, individuals, and institutions in the United States.”
The bipartisan co-sponsors were lobbied by the small non-profit Bible Nation Society, based in Corunna, Michigan, said Jason Georges, the group’s executive director. Georges said that other members of Congress, particularly the Congressional Prayer Caucus, were also interested in the KJV resolution.
The Bible Nation Society, affiliated with Immanuel Baptist Church in Corunna, was founded by Immanuel’s pastor, Douglas Levesque. At the Bible Nation Society’s 2010 Bible in Culture Conference, Levesque preached on the “Antichrist Quotient,” in which he laid out wide-ranging conspiracy theories that President Obama might be the Antichrist.
The Bible Nation Society, which is also sponsoring an Expo on the National Mall next week to celebrate the KJV 400th anniversary, came to Capitol Hill to lobby for the resolution at the height of the budget battle, said Georges. That made the effort more challenging, he said, but he saw it as an opportunity “to pause and think about the principles of money — the debtor is servant to the lender, ideas of usury, Joseph’s idea of saving, storage, national saving for hard times, that’s in the Book of Genesis. . . there is a principle there that people can glean some wisdom from.”
Georges insists, “we’re not promoting a theocratic state” — just that policymakers should find answers to the nation’s pressing questions in the King James Bible. The KJV, he added, “speaks to issues today if we would all pause for a minute, it would give us answers.”
This is our country being serious and sober about the pressing problems of the day.
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