Thought Theater

Monica "No-Goodling" - Bush Tool & Theocratic Tyrant? genre: Hip-Gnosis & Polispeak & Six Degrees of Speculation

What is it with these holier than thou theocrats and breaking the rules...and the law? Does an education at Pat Robertson's Regent University include a course called "Crime and the Christian - The Ten Commandments of Theocracy Building"?

Not only did the Bush administration fast track the barely thirty year old Monica Goodling to one of the most powerful positions in the Justice Department, it gave a total of 150 appointments to graduates from the same Regent University. Then again, if one seeks to remake government into a God and GOP lovin' theocracy, the more the merrier, eh?

From The Washington Post:

Former Justice Department counselor Monica M. Goodling and former chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson routinely broke the law by conducting political litmus tests on candidates for jobs as immigration judges and line prosecutors, according to an inspector general's report released today.

Goodling passed over hundreds of qualified applicants and squashed the promotions of others after deeming candidates insufficiently loyal to the Republican party, said investigators, who interviewed 85 people and received information from 300 other job seekers at Justice. Sampson developed a system to screen immigration judge candidates based on improper political considerations and routinely took recommendations from the White House Office of Political Affairs and Presidential Personnel, the report said.

Goodling regularly asked candidates for career jobs: "What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?" the report said. One former Justice Department official told investigators she had complained that Goodling was asking interviewees for their views on abortion, according to the report.

Taking political or personal factors into account in employment decisions for career positions violates civil service laws and can run afoul of ethics rules. Investigators said today that both Goodling and Sampson had engaged in "misconduct."

The Justice Department IG's report, released this morning, cites several other workers who may have engaged in misconduct by using political or sexual orientation to screen candidates for immigration judgeships.

OK, it's time to rant. Frankly, this is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from those who are awash in religious ideology and absolutist dogma. Cloaked in their inviolable righteousness, there is little these individuals see as off-limits in the pursuit of their messianic mission.

These zealots are the product of incessant indoctrination who have been encouraged to operate mindlessly, absent a modicum of restraint or reservation. They are taught to be soldiers of God in the likes of Jesus Camps...convinced that they should stop at nothing less than a full-scale institutional transformation to the tenets of Christian teachings.

In my opinion, those groups that are promoting this blind allegiance are the virtual equivalent of cults. They have been able to avoid that characterization because of the prevalence of so many like-minded individuals...but that does nothing to abate the countless similarities. It is extremism no matter the permutations employed to describe or defend it.

Like Pat Robertson, some of these individuals have no hesitation to apply Biblically inspired judgments to the random events of daily life...indicting those they disagree with and glorifying those who share in their shamanic superstitions. This fanciful obsession with their own self-centered ideations has become the prototype for a political pathology that must be excised and extinguished if we are to maintain any semblance of separation of church and state.

If these people want a Christian kingdom, they will need to construct it outside the gates of government. Further, if they continue to usurp established law in order to achieve their divine domain here on earth, I suspect that they will eventually find that the gates of heaven they gleefully glorify have been locked...with a sign attached that states..."Christianists need not apply, admission is reserved for those who lived a Christian life; not those who appointed themselves as Christ's earthly executioners."