Note to Conscientious, Compassionate Conservatives : It's NOT Working

Look, folks, it's not working. It's just not working.

Under the Bush administration, the number of Americans living under the poverty level has grown -- by 5.4 million -- to 37 million.

This administration has destabilized the entire middle-east and created a training ground for terrorists -- while at the same time virtually assuring the establishment of an Islamic theocracy with close ties to Iran. All in the name of "democracy."

This administration -- NOT America or Americans -- has trampled on American values as well as Christian values. They have abandoned the Geneva conventions. They have suspended due process and embraced torture. They have questioned the "patriotism" of dissenters. They have made a mockery of constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties.

We're giving lip service to the "war on terror" at the same moment we're harboring terrorists who worked for the CIA. Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA operative from the 1960s through the 1980s, was involved in the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner, recently declassified CIA documents reveal. At this moment, with no media coverage of the story, I suspect that Posada will stay in custody until the end of Bush's presidency, and then he will be pardoned, as was his partner Orlando Bosch (by Bush Sr.).

And as a recent study in the Journal of Religion and Society indicated, societies suffer when they reject humanistic concepts of social responsibility in favor of a belief in the providential care of a benevolent God. God's work on earth, to paraphrase JFK, must be ours. I think this has a lot to do with how one chooses to believe in God, whether one uses God as a rationalization for exploitation of others and the maintenance of ridiculous myths of cultural or religious superiority and, ultimately cultural, political, or economic dominance.

What have we gained by all of this? Are we better off now than we were five years ago? We've lost friends and sympathizers worldwide.

Ballooning deficits have pushed our national debt over EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS ($8,000,000,000,000.00)!!! At the same time, rampant corruption rages in our representative government. And while poverty grows, the wealthy are getting wealthier.

In the name of reason, my conservative friends, let's agree : It's just not working.

It's just not working.