God to Republicans: "TAKE A HINT"!

While the New Puritans shrill about intentionally mischaraterized positions of America's most patriotic institutions (like the ACLU), this is the behavior of the party they support:

Now, with the administration struggling to overcome complaints about its response to Hurricane Katrina and the declining support for the war in Iraq, Bush needs DeLay more than ever. But DeLay, waylaid by yesterday's indictment, won't be there.

Instead, there will be the taint of another ethics investigation in the Republican Party at the same time that Senate majority leader Bill Frist answers questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission about his sale of stock in a company that family members founded; as Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, faces grand jury scrutiny over whether he leaked the identity of a CIA officer; and as a Senate committee looks at the relationships between scandal-ridden lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a host of Republican leaders.

And ...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 - Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

--snip--

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

Pardon me God, Your High-ness, but I don't think they're listening...