That poll-time religion

Barack Obama continues chiseling the mortar out of the wall that separates church from state:

"Doing the Lord's work is a thread that runs through our politics since the very beginning," Obama said in a speech to United Church of Christ's Iowa conference.

"And it puts the lie to the notion that separation of church and state in America means somehow that faith should have no role in public life," Obama said.

He takes the position that what's bad from the religious-right gander is great when the liberal goose does it:

"...somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart."

Here's where the stomach really turns:

"The Iraq war is not just a security problem. It is a moral problem," Obama said. "These are the challenges that test our conscience as Americans, a people of faith."

To state the what-should-be-obvious, Operation Pandora is entirely a product of faith — faith in a moronic born-again President who receives personal counsel from a man 2000-years dead and his similarly god-struck British counterpart; faith in pre-war intelligence that was literally incredible; faith that people would want to be bombed into freedom; faith that attacking a hemmed-in secular dictatorship would stop fundamentalist terrorism from entirely unrelated countries; faith that ignoring all planning wouldn't compromise the mission; faith in the "generals on the ground" — no, not those generals, we sacked them — the ones who still play the company tune... for now; and faith that the surge would work. Without a doubt, come September, we'll be called upon to have faith that all the surge needs is another Friedman Unit. And another, and another.

And what should also be obvious is that religion and its practitioners do not have a unique charter for or, of late, an especially enviable track record of being the arbiters of what is moral. Morality is as morality does, and claiming an invisible sky daddy doesn't enter into it.

It's time to stop with all the fucking faith and say "bring it on" to reason.