By Ella Jay Neal-Tubbs | Published Thursday, November 5, 2009
I read the letter from Ted Shaw with outrage, even though I also wanted to laugh. It was one of the most ridiculous and insulting things I've seen in my 89 years.
He says our president and many elected politicians are under the influence of the spirit of the Antichrist. Since when did cooperating with and working with our allies and the rest of the world to solve our many common problems become "one world" government, an Antichrist?
Maybe it is just that President Obama inherited a mess of disaster. It was the previous administration that diverted us from going all-out against the people that attacked us Sept. 11, 2001, and instead took us into Iraq. This has now cost, what, more than $700 billion? Over 4,000 Americans have been lost. And every single claim the Bush administration made to get us into Iraq was wrong.
They misrepresented, and distorted, and outright lied about the intelligence information. It is a mess that President Obama is trying to get us out of. We ignored our real enemies: Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, so that we now face a much harder time in Afghanistan.
It was President Bush who ignored the coming domestic economic disaster, as his business and corporate friends in Wall Street and high finance, mostly Republican supporters, indulged their greed and indifference until our financial institutions almost collapsed. It was the Bush administration that violated the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution, actually seizing and holding without any legal rights many innocent people; thus making us even more hated in the world. They actually made torture an American policy. Former general and Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower would turn over in his grave at such a thought.
The covenant that Mr. Shaw thinks God made with the pilgrims on the Mayflower must have been a very unusual one. The pilgrims were strict Calvinists who later persecuted any religious belief other than their own, broke all promises and showed great ingratitude by taking the land from the native Americans.
If Mr. Shaw and his like-minded friends think the persecution of other religious beliefs, theft of land and murder of Native Americans were part of God's covenant, then I can see why they would think President Bush was in that (very un-Biblical) tradition.
This is what President Obama is trying to clean up. I say it is a monumental and difficult task, and I say "God bless him - and the American people."
Ella Jay Neal-Tubbs Fort Worth, formerly of Decatur
