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Apocalypse Soon
 Those who like to portray President
Bush as a nincompoop always fasten on his alleged mispronunciation of
nuclear. It apparently never occurs  to
these intellectual snobs that maybe he is the only one pronouncing it correctly and the rest of
us have been getting it wrong.
A trivial
matter, you say? We may soon face nucular war in the Middle East. Seymour
Hersh of The New Yorker has reported that the president has
refused to rule out the nucular option against Iran.
President
Bush’s religious views are unclear, but he is reportedly tight with
people like the preacher John Hagee of the Religious Right, for whom events
in the Middle East hold the promise of Armageddon. Think of Dr. Strangelove
reading the Book of Revelation, and you’ll get some idea of the
showdown they seem to have in mind.
As a
Catholic, I take my hat off to these “Bible Christians.” We
Catholics keep Bibles on hand in case we really need them, but it must be
admitted that we can’t hold a candle to these folks. They can quote
rings around us, Scripture-wise. What do we know? When they cite a verse
like Second Ben-Hur 26:19, we can only take their word for it. And they are
at their most impressive when they interpret the Book of Revelation, which
lays out the schedule for the Rapture, the Second Coming, the clash of Gog
and Magog, and related events right down to the minute.
Hagee looks
to Revelation, the most exciting book in the Good Book, for
“God’s foreign policy,” as he calls it, and he
doesn’t seem to share the voters’ general disillusionment with
the way things are going over in Babylon and environs. When you’ve
got the Almighty’s playbook, what do election results really matter?
I still
can’t figure out what liberals mean by the expression
right-wing, but Hagee & Co. evidently don’t take their
bearings from such arid secular humanist documents as The Wealth
of Nations and The Federalist Papers. Adam Smith
and Alexander Hamilton wrote before the advent of nucular weapons gave
foreign policy apocalyptic possibilities, especially with George W.
Bush’s finger on the button.
![[Breaker quote for
Apocalypse Soon: The Book of Revelation and the flag]](2006breakers/061117.gif) Now that even
the neoconservatives are having a few second thoughts about our Babylon
policy, it’s time to raise an issue that most of the postelection
analyses are ignoring. In fact I’ve seen not a single mention of it
anywhere. You could easily get the impression that it’s dead, upstaged
by such issues as war, illegal immigration, and same-sex marriage (a clear
threat to the nucular family).
I refer, of
course, to the flag-burning amendment. This has energized conservatives
and patriotic organizations for years, especially the American Legion, which
has poured millions of dollars into the drive to prevent hippies from torching
Old Glory with impunity. Emboldened by the Republicans’ defeat, these
dope-crazed “flower children” are already making the most of
their opportunity to blacken the skies with smoke. A neighbor of mine has
suffered second-degree burns on both hands while trying to rescue a flag
from desecration.
We could
have predicted it. This is what happens when America lets its guard down.
It is no
discredit to the Framers of our Constitution to note that they didn’t
think of everything. They were only mortal, and they couldn’t have
foreseen the startling implosion of America after generations of moral
relativism had taken their toll on the minds of our youth. But the passage of
time inevitably presents new challenges, and now it’s up to us to meet
this one.
I
haven’t seen Clint Eastwood’s new movie, Flags of Our
Fathers, but it’s not hard to imagine how the Marines who
planted the flag on Iwo Jima would react if they could witness what is being
done to that flag today. They would be astounded that it should even be felt
necessary to amend the Constitution to prevent behavior they would have
found unthinkable. It’s rather like amending the Constitution to outlaw
stabbing one’s mother.
Alas, what
was once freakishly infrequent has now become so common that revising the
fundamental law of the land is about the only way left to cope with it. Indeed,
many well-meaning liberals will tell you with a straight face that burning the
flag is protected by the Constitution itself!
Such
rubbish is enough to make you go nucular.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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