Outlived His Usefulness
I’ve said here before that Baghdad Jim McDermott, my congressman, is a virtual voting machine for me. I’d have to really dig through voting records to find a vote with which I didn’t concur.
Today, he came close to being my proxy again when he omitted the words “under God” while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before the House of Reprehensibleness. I don’t believe in God. I think the words “one nation, under God, indivisible” are the most preposterous oxymoron imaginable. There is nothing more divisive than mixing religion with civilian affairs.
McDermott tried to make a statement today by his omission, but he made two errors, from my point of view. First, if his intent was to refute the “under God” inclusion, he should have just stood silent instead of saying anything. I operate by the legal concept of “entire agreement” regarding the Pledge - if I can’t say all of it, I can’t say any of it. I can’t say the pledge as currently configured - it’s not good enough just to leave out the words I don’t like.
Second, after his oratorical statement of intent - and if you watch the video, you’ll conclude with me that it was clearly intentional - McDermott dissembled, as he has before, and tried to claim, through a hapless spokesman, that it was a mistake and he wouldn’t do it again.
If he’d have stood by his act, and expanded on it by calling for the excision of “under God” from the Pledge, I’d be wholly in support of him. But he’s left me, again, with the sense that he’s a fop and a loser, an owner of an almost impregnable electoral sinecure from which a great liberal leader could thunder eloquently from a bully pulpit, and he simply lacks the gravitas to fulfill his destiny. He pulled the same vanishing act when he was a state senator from Seattle, unbelievably ceding political power to Dixie Lee Ray and the woodenheaded Pierce County (Tacoma) types that came to dominate state politics in the 80s.
I’m embarrassed by Jim McDermott today. Not, as the Republican imams say I should be, because he dared to say the Pledge as it should be configured, but because, at a critical tipping point in the “separation of church and state” debate, he’s lost his mojo again.
“Under God” must go. And so should Jim McDermott.
