Not that they’ll ever hear it, but I think Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, and evan­gel­i­cals who unques­tion­ing­ly back Don­ald Trump, deserve a ver­sion of a les­son I offered to the local dri­vers employed by CBS News in the ear­ly days  of the Afghan war.

Biden declared he’d only drop out of the pres­i­den­tial con­test “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’…”
Lead­ing evan­gel­i­cal TV preach­ers reg­u­lar­ly intone ver­sions of this recent anoint­ing of Trump“: The hand of God is on him and he can­not be stopped”.”
Our Afghan dri­vers seemed to base their life and death cal­cu­la­tions on inton­ing “Inshal­lah” (God wil­ing) aloud at cru­cial moments .After one hair-rais­ing ride too many, I sat them down and with the help of our trans­la­tor, made a polite speech along the fol­low­ing lines: “You’re all good Moslems and will sure­ly go straight to Par­adise when you die. Because we  are mere infi­dels, we might not. So we’d like you to bear in mind that God has a lot to do, and gave peo­ple brains so they didn’t have to rely on him to decide when it’s safe to pass a car or truck if there’s anoth­er one com­ing towards you. I’m sure he’d also appre­ci­ate it if you slowed down a lit­tle, and checked your tyres, lights and brakes every day.”
Their col­lec­tive reply was tol­er­ant smiles and mur­murs of “Inshal­lah.”
Since we all made it through, maybe they were onto some­thing. But what we know about the extent of the cos­mos makes me think if there is a god, my advice was sound.
Con­sid­er­ing the stakes in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, only vot­ers with an Afghan dri­ver men­tal­i­ty would find it rea­son­able to use their con­cept of the deity as the sole deci­sion-mak­er at the bal­lot box.
Those who fol­low Judeo-Chris­t­ian teach­ings should note Gen­e­sis 1:26, which says their god grant­ed man (as in humans, lest I offend) “…domin­ion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heav­ens and over … every creep­ing thing that creeps on the earth.”

                      WHO EXERCISES DOMINION?

 In terms of allot­ting a pres­i­den­tial role in the exer­cis­ing of that “domin­ion”, it shouldn’t require divine inspi­ra­tion to choose between a decent if stub­born man in appar­ent denial of the vicis­si­tudes of aging, and a foul-mouthed, often inco­her­ent, duplic­i­tous crim­i­nal whose for­mer vice- pres­i­dent, sec­re­tary of defense, sec­re­tary of state, chief of staff, nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er, press sec­re­tary, com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor and attor­ney gen­er­al have all pub­licly warned “is  errat­ic, immoral and some­one who must nev­er be let near the White House again.”
MAGA zealots are no more like­ly to have heard, seen or take those crit­i­cisms on board than their polit­i­cal polar oppo­sites are to become FOX News devo­tees,  however.
Nor will they be repelled by the “vision” of the Republican’s “Project 2025” and its aim of mak­ing the U.S. a “Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist” nation.
The genius of the tome is that the open­ing essay lays out aims no pro­fessed con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian vot­er is like­ly to find much fault with, then buries the details in 920 pages. That ensures  it’s about as like­ly to be read and digest­ed as small print online pri­va­cy promis­es or pay­ment terms and conditions.
By way of con­trast, Israeli Jews, who are weaned on the notion that they are “God’s Cho­sen Peo­ple” resid­ing in “the Promised Land”, are rely­ing on sec­u­lar means to make their voic­es and aims heard and act­ed upon.
Week after week, in the midst of a war, they ral­ly in the streets to demand peace, jus­tice and bring­ing Hamas-held )hostages (or their remains) home. Their mes­sage to Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu is clear and sim­ple: “It is your duty to return all of the cit­i­zens you forsook.”
As an adden­dum, they’re also call­ing for him to vacate his office and hold new elec­tions, which every poll says he will lose.
There’s a les­son in that for Amer­i­cans, I think.

                IT’S NOT JUST A RELIGION THING

Hand­ing the ball off isn’t lim­it­ed to a deity or those who may believe in one, how­ev­er. In  a recent cas­ti­ga­tion of Trump’s per­sis­tent and pro­fuse false­hoods, promis­es of vengeance on his per­ceived ene­mies and what they infer about how he plans to gov­ern, the Wash­ing­ton Post edi­to­r­i­al board wrote: “He gets away with such talk in part because he does not let him­self get pinned down on specifics. Vot­ers should demand bet­ter than such cyn­i­cal strate­gic ambiguity.”
For­give me if I’m miss­ing the point, but the ethos under which I laboured for more than four decades was that it is the duty of jour­nal­ists to prod, dig, seek, demand  and clar­i­fy in the ser­vice of the pub­lic what those in or pur­su­ing pow­er want to obscure.
It’s also a basic tenet that when polit­i­cal pro­tag­o­nists are flail­ing, fail­ing or fal­si­fy­ing, one of them doesn’t get cut slack just because it’s the way they always act.
The late night com­e­dy hosts often expose more of Trump’s vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, mala­propisms and inco­her­ent bab­bling in a sin­gle mono­logue than main­stream news­pa­pers and the evening or cable news­casts do in a week.
One can only hope that the next cru­cial choice for U.S. democ­ra­cy is made pri­mar­i­ly by using brains, rather than a ver­sion of the pre­ferred injunc­tion of Afghan drivers.

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