AM I a TRUE R.?

Thus far in my short blog, I have only attacked the Democrats. I have been a lifelong Republican since I saw Ronald Reagan sworn in to Office on the South Lawn on January 20th. 1981.

Most people get their political socialization from their parents. I am one of the few who actually admit it. It cannot be said that we have not had our battles. My daddy who is a former Chairman of the Old Bridge Republican Party and has held various other posts within the Republican Party in NJ; and has done quite a bit of work in Buckingham County VA. He was an early supporter of John McCain while I am not.

John McCain to me had always been one of the worst politicians around. He never even shared his toys. There is sometimes give and take and I followed Jesse Helms’ idea of compromising your priorities but not your principles. John McCain always had to have his priorities and I was never sure what his principles were. He started to share when he realized that Bush could not run for a third term and that Cheney was not going to run. I tried to remind my father of McCain’s faults, but he did not listen. He went with McCain when Huckabee still had an outside shot. McCain only did as well as he did because of his Vice Presidential Running Mate. I was more than ready to write in Dick Cheney’s name, because I knew we were upshits creek anyway. By the time the NC primary rolled around any candidate that I liked was already done. So I had the ability to vote for Hillary. (More on that in the future) I would do it again too.

One hatred I have of the Republicans is the 2001 Gubernatorial Primary in NJ. The favored candidate was Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFransesco. Daddy went along way early. I have not liked the guy from the first time I saw him years before. Long story short, I caved in on that one after saying I would not vote for him if hell froze over. I never really had to vote for him though because his crookedness was coming out. I did have to have Rebecca take a picture with him while he kissed her. He changed the law of the filing deadline and moved the primary back a month. It was the fact that his wife did not want any more embarrassment that he actually dropped out. I wish she told him a lot earlier. All of the Republicans went along and it was changed. There was a saving Grace though; Bob Franks became the Candidate; He was handed the line, but his announcement speech indicated that he would change things for the better. I.E. not cow tow to the Republican establishment that pretty near destroyed Whitman. Bob Franks always campaigned like a Democrat, lie, cheat and steal. I loved that about him and more Republicans should campaign like that. What I loved more was that he was an honest hardworking man who took the time to evaluate his positions and work for the greater good of the country. The party bosses did not like that because they were going to loose out on the graft that they got. Then Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler won the primary. Dad thought I should vote for him. I made it a point to not trust people who voted for Gary Hart for President back in 1984. Bret Schundler was the NJ State Field Head for that campaign. Then this guy always tried to compare himself to Reagan. I never voted for Reagan because of something called the U.S. Constitution. I never learned of Schundler’s reasons or epiphany. I have a keen sense of who political people support in primaries as a way of judging their values. That fall I wrote in Donnie DiFransesco, as an F/U to the party. That is not short for follow up either. Daddy did not like that. I also made it my business to tell every one what I did and why. Daddy said that was hatred and bitterness. That was the point.

Another disagreement with daddy and the rest of the party was over W. Daddy said he screwed up too much. I reminded him that he was starting to sound like his father. Not a good comment to make to him. The party sold W. down the river, and under the bus. He got stuck with lots of crap; he started the war based on intelligence from Billy. Billy should have been looking over the data smoking his cigar instead of doing other things with it.

The New Jersey Republican Party had too many people that were too willing to cut deals with Democrats, much to the chagrin of the people who actually voted Republican and did the work of trying to get them elected. They did not take stands on issues that they should have because too many Republican Leaders were in bed with Democrats. That is not only figuratively, but literally.

I am still trying to figure out the NC Republicans; but I thought the politics in NJ was bad: at least there though when the Democrats lied to the press, the Dems paid the price in the news; it took them a long time, but the press sort of got it. In NC the press gets lied to by the Dems and they still spin it positively. The Dems have done stuff that would make Bosses in Jersey blush with shame.

Daddy and I have our disagreements because he likes to fight with a hammer. I like jackhammers, machetes, and tanks.

Author: Rory B. Bellows

Sounds like it. PolitickerNJ is reporting that Schundler is sending out smoke signals that he may run for Mayor of Jersey City again.

1. Would you like to improve your reading ability?  Here are seven pleasurable ways.  HT: Jake Bouma

2.  Prodigal Jon explores why society tends to picture God as angry in his post “Painting God mad” at Stuff Christians Like.

3.  Flatulence is now considered bullying.  Jr. High boys of the world… beware!  (HT: Nuke)

4.  Evidently Obama’s uncle fought for the Soviet Army so he could liberate Auschwitz.  Velvet Hammer blogs on other Obama lies – numbering now 51 in this campaign.  Do we see a pattern here?

5.  Pistol Pete on what makes a great blog.  Caffeinated Thoughts has the honor of making his blogroll.

6.  A “Christian” T-Shirt concept that hasn’t quite caught on:

Source: Naked Pastor

7.  Straight Talk Express?  See below.  I don’t want it to be said that I give GOP politicians a free pass here.  There is much to criticize about John McCain as well.

HT: Stephanie

8.  Organic Faith shared some thoughts about Dr. Tim Keller’s message to last year’s Gospel Coalition regarding how pastors are losing focus in the pulpit.

Dr. Tim Keller said last year in a teaching to the Gospel Coalition that the difference between Gospel-centered preaching and lifeless pulpit talk is a focus on Jesus. He said that his wife told him that his best sermons are those that focus on the transforming power and example of Christ. He basically hit on an issue that I have been concerned about for a while. In the effort to be relevant, it has become all too common for preachers to deliver good messages on moral teachings instead of Jesus-focused calls to divine transformation and human repentance.

That is so true.  May that never be said of my ministry in the pulpit.

9.  Anne Jackson asks, “what is something you feel you can’t say in church, or around other Christians?”  She gets some humorous and serious responses. 

Some responses that caught my eye:

• Anne started things off – “I suck at reading my bible.”
• I can relate to Pete who said, “That sometimes when there is a dramatic pause in my message, and I look like I’m waiting on God to give me something really powerful to say, I’m not. In reality I’m just wondering if I zipped up my zipper before I went up on stage.” (I laughed out loud at that one.)
• “Most people I know who claim to follow God are really sucky people who don’t care about anything but themselves and their comfort. It makes me not want to follow their rules.”
• “When I’m leading worship, I sometimes think of all 31 flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins.” (Huh?  Ok then.)
• “How I feel more alone than ever, when someone gets up to the mic and talks about the deep friendships that can be found in church small/care groups . . . and that just has NOT been my experience.”
• “That law is easier than grace … just tell me what to do and not do and I’ll give it my best shot.  Grace is too big, to wide open and scary.”
• “I don’t like Beth Moore Studies.” (It seems like every women’s Bible study I hear of is doing one.)
• “Stop making Christianity a scapegoat for not developing a personality. Quit being judgement, flaky, egotistical, mean, rude, fake in the name of a God who was none of those things.”

HT: Rodney Olson

10.  An interesting way to get people to church.

And it is at a BAPTIST church!!!!  They reported their largest attendance ever (just kidding).

HT: Crummy Church Signs

11.  If you haven’t already found this gem, I highly recommend the Christian Classics Ethreal Library where you can read works by some great dead people.

12.  Here at Caffeinated Thoughts I am concerned about your health.  Nintendo is coming out with the Wii Fit.  Exercise for video game junkies.  Nice.

13.  You know you spend too much time blogging and commenting when…

HT: Smart Pastor

14.  I am all about networking.  It is in the name of the ministry I serve.  I have been a member of the National Network of Youth Ministries since 1998.  I have benefited from the youth ministry networks that I have been a part of or have led in my youth ministry career.  Since moving back to Des Moines six years ago I have been disappointed by the lack of a vibrant cross-denominational network for pastors in Des Moines.  Sam Rainer (a recent Southern Seminary grad – congratulations Sam!) blogs about the benefits of pastors who get together.

15.  No kudos for Indiana Jones…. just read over on Greg Stier’s blog some harsh, but likely well deserved, criticism of Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I was tuned in from the opening scene through the final scene. But, and I hesitate to make this declaration, I hated Indiana Jones.

There I said it.

Don’t get me wrong, Harrison Ford did a great job in reprising his role as the combative and compelling archaeologist. Shia LaBeouf did a fine job as a whippersnapper whip snapper in the making. And the villain, Cate Blanchett, was very good at being vey bad. But the real villains in this movie were not the old school Communists of Russia but the lame writers of the movie screenplay. Indy should have hunted them down instead of the Crystal Skull and given them a good shalacking.

Please don’t misinterpret. I am a HUGE Indiana Jones fan. I really wanted this movie to be great. In the first thirty minutes of the movie I thought that it could be. The next thirty minutes made me start to doubt. Doubt turned into resignation over the next 1,800 seconds. The last cringe-inducing, please-don’t-go-there segment made me want to reach through the screen, grab Spielberg by the lapel and ask him, “Why? Why? Why?” The director of E.T. should go home, sit in front of his old school typewriter (the one he typed the screenplay of Jaws with) and bring back a plot worthy of his considerable talents.

I guess I’ll wait for the DVD, LOL.

16.  Are you frustrated with no signs of spiritual growth in teens?  Tim Schmoyer gives three reasons why youth pastors (and parents too) may feel this way.

• Unrealistic expectations
• Forgetting that growth is a process.
• We are watching the process close up.

17.  David Innes of King’s College suggests that John McCain should tap Bret Schundler, the three-term mayor of Jersey City, NJ as his running mate.  An interesting suggestion, I’m not so sure a Mayor would be a good choice, but I do like his credentials.

18.  Gay Marriage by Judicial Decree – Stuart Taylor, Jr. on the recent California Supreme Court decision.  (HT: Mere Orthodoxy)

19.  Rick Warren – It is your skill, not preaching and prayer that will grow your church.

Ugh.  I think I just vomited in my mouth a little.

HT: Irish Calvinist

20.  Quote: Abraham Piper at 22 Words

If unapplied theology is worthless, we shouldn’t claim to believe truth with arguments, until we’ve proven we believe it with our lives.

I was negotiating with a young bartender over the feasibility of obtaining Lily a green-tea martini (we are all Orientalists here) when she leaned over to me and said, I think that’s Reverend Billy.

Who? I gasped.

Him! Right there! We were whispering urgently now, two hunters in a blind or fine just two girls on the old starfuck prowl. Lily had just seen the documentary What Would Jesus Buy? that chronicles the Reverend’s recent cross-country trip, but I hadn’t and it was consequently harder for me to believe that the man in front of us actually was the anti-consumerist deity of my early political consciousness.

Lily, does he have…highlights?

She nodded. I think he does. Have highlights. We stared.

I tried to remain aloof, aloofness being my only game and a consistently unsuccessful one–when people are intrigued by said aloofness it’s usually inadvertent and I could in fact care less about their presence and when I do care I find it impossible to appear aloof and instead veer sharply toward undignified transparency–but then Krista, chipper and looking a lot like Snow White, said, I’ll go talk to him!

Freya trotted over to join her, and Lily and I were left gaping at the man who was the political inspiration of the woman, Megan, who was then the political inspiration of me. It soon became clear to me that Reverend Billy had Megan beat on charisma, but I think she won the earnesty race. And who needs charisma when there’s a black handkerchief over your face? Megan was an anti-globalization activist, and also my Resident Adviser at the now defunct Governor’s School for Public Issues and the Future of New Jersey. She pronounced her name as Meee-ghan. (Meee-ghan. She was an undergrad at Wesleyan, which is where she learned to pronounce her name like that, natch.)

Megan had short, dirty hair and hairy armpits. I had hairy armpits the summer I attended Governor’s School, too, but Megan’s armpits were the kind of hairy that is disconcertingly braid-able. Also, she did Bread and Puppet theater, also her boyfriend was a thousand feet tall and weighed seventy pounds even counting his pigtails, also she led radical walking tours of the Astor Place-area Starbucks, also she and I were both almost kicked out of G-School when we distributed pro-choice anti-Bret Schundler literature and tried to bully him out of giving a speech.

It was a big summer, I feel in love in two directions: there was Gabe, my soulmate from the moment I realized we both wore our lucky t-shirts on the first days of things, and then there was Megan. It’s an important moment in a young woman’s life when she realizes that playing cute is a waste of everyone’s time. Megan taught me how to get angry and all the reasons I should never apologize for staying that way.

Keep your laws off my body, betch!

Learning to accept alienating people is the most valuable political lesson I’ve ever learned; I’m not sure if Megan got it from the Reverend Billy or figured it out herself. It’s not hard, except it is.

(I am at a cafe and a woman just asked her boyfriend almost unconsciously What time do you think we’ll be hungry again? I completely loved that. I am totally guilty of that kind of hyper-planning.)

In the summer of 2001 Bret Schundler was still the mayor of Jersey City, the seedy and beloved metropolis of my youth. Schundler’s entire political career seems like an accident of circumstance; in the first of the only three elections he’s ever won, the field was split between nineteen candidates, and seventeen of them were Democrats. Schundler was elected as mayor with less than 20% of the vote.

He was reelected for two more terms, though, and some right-minded people I know from Jersey City will grudgingly acknowledge that economically, he did aiight. Mayors don’t need to make decisions on health care, abortion, labor rights or capital punishment, of course, and on all those issues Schundler’s policy is basically medieval.

I guess there was no chance that the state of New Jersey would elect him, but Megan and I (her ever-eager student) weren’t taking any chances. Armed with a well-loved copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, we took it upon ourselves to educate the other forty-nine women at Governor’s School about their reproductive rights. I made fliers with ghastly statistics and drawings of bloody coat-hangers, and we raided closets for real wire hangers to brandish at the man when he arrived.

Megan’s waifish boyfriend drove down from his workshop in Vermont to help us make a puppet whose illegal abortion had gone gruesomely wrong, and then we practiced some chants. As part of the preparation for actually accosting Schundler in person, Megan taught me some of her black bloc protest techniques. I learned how to resist arrest in a way that I’ve since forgotten, but I think it mainly involved laying down, and she had me prepare a handkerchief in a water-bottle filled with vinegar to neutralize the effects of tear gas.

(Don’t laugh! We knew that Bret Schundler’s cronies weren’t going to tear gas us, but this was a radical apprenticeship with an eye to the future. Vinegared handkerchiefs have since been very useful in my life thank you.)

I fear that I’ve mellowed a lot since the days of Megan. I haven’t been to a demonstration in awhile, I just still wear tight black pants. It remains intimidating sometimes to be politically contentious on my own, and even harder not to smile and ignore it when I start talking about the evils of Mike Huckabee and the man I’m on a date with puts his arm around me and confides to his friend like it’s an apology, She’s feisty.

No, I should say, I am not feisty I am only interested in ensuring that when you impregnate me later it doesn’t mean that we have to wake up next to each other for the rest of our lives. Trust me, this is a good thing for everyone.

Full disclosure: I am actually quite smitten with the person who called me feisty. Around that same time last night he pinched my ass (pinched my ass!) while I was trying to talk to a Swedish art dealer about Gertrude Stein. I liked the ass pinching a lot. Later, the art dealer invited me to an opening on Tuesday but because I’d arrived with a gentleman the dealer gave my date his card, instead of me. It was so proper I forgot to be offended and wanted to kiss them both. Things are complicated and I wonder if, like me, Megan ever forgets that the personal is political. I think Reverend Billy does, because Lily and I were right. He totally has highlights!