I’m opening up a new category - Burning Bush - to muse a bit on less political aspects of faith.
To start off, Richard Hall from connexions has a great post on prayer - here’s an excerpt, but read the whole thing:
Prayer is not a problem to be solved, nor is it a technique to be learned. Prayer is a relationship to be entered into. True friendships are not forged on the basis of what good the other will be able to do you. Friendships exist for their own sake. They are a good end in themselves. We do not pray to God because of what we expect him to do for us. We pray because of who he is, the eternal Father who loves us beyond our understanding and who longs for us to respond to him.
Kevin Drum does an excellent job of summarizing why we should care about what “Scooter” Libby is alleged to have done:
But for now, here’s the bottom line: Fitzgerald didn’t charge Scooter Libby with mistakenly making a few unimportant false statements to the grand jury. He charged him with deliberately constructing a false story about how he learned about Valerie Plame, and then repeatedly telling this story to both FBI agents and the grand jury. That story was a lie, and it was a premeditated lie designed to cover up the fact that he had engaged in a long and persistent effort to uncover information about Joe Wilson’s wife and disseminate it to reporters.
This is especially important for those of us who claim to follow Jesus (or are, more generally, considered “Christians”). If we do not hold those whom we elect to account when they violate one of the core teachings of our faith, then are we not in fact accountable for their actions? In a country where we put those folks into power, we are.
I suspect that many Christians will at the very least be silent on this issue and at most will seek to justify Mr. Libby’s alleged behavior (and potentially that of others in the administration). If this is the case, then the church in our country really has been reduced to a do nothing social club. This is not to say that you have to oppose the President if you support him - but at the very least, the more conservative parts of the church should be demanding that he clean up his own moral house in order to retain that support.
Patrick Fitzgerald: “At the end of the day, what appears is that Mr Libby’s story, that he was at the tail end of a chain of phone calls, passing on from one reporter what he heard from another, was not true - it was false,” he said.
“He was at the beginning of the chain of the phone calls, the first official to disclose this information outside the government, to a reporter. And he lied about it afterwards, under oath, and repeatedly.”
Karl Rove, for the time being, remains uncharged. Time will tell whether Joe Wilson gets his wish and sees Rove “frog-marched” out of the White House.
There also is a larger, looming question: what was the Vice President’s role in all of this? Libby may go to jail rather than give up his boss, but it’s hard to believe that he would have gone to the trouble of outing Valerie Plame without SOME direction from higher up. And for him, higher up consists of only two people: Mr. Cheney, and Mr. Bush.
We probably never will know the whole story, but if Mr. Libby is in fact convicted, then perhaps some justice will come in this case. However, for the 2000 Americans and countless Iraqis who have died as a result of this administration’s lies in the lead-up to the Iraq war, justice is nowhere in sight.
