Trump’s Letter to Pelosi

This is…entirely normal. Well, this hellish new kind of normal we’ve been having of late, anyway. Trump has sent quite a letter to Nancy Pelosi, laying bare his issues with this whole impeachment thing:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/17/politics/donald-trump-letter-nancy-pelosi-impeachment/index.html

I’ll be honest; I only made it to “you are the ones interfering in America’s elections” before I finally stopped, because it’s textbook projection. Not even the standard deflection talking point of “it was Ukraine” (which, for the record IT.WAS.NOT. although the guys Uncle Vlad had on the case may indeed have made use of the place and/or its people in the execution of their directives.) One thing (ikr? who can pick just one with this guy?) that really got to me was the bit about Pelosi’s repeatedly saying she’s praying for him, how it’s either untrue or meant negatively.

Maybe it’s my upbringing, but I was certainly raised to not question the sincerity or motivations of the prayers of others. Especially if they have the good grace to be praying for you in particular. So it sounds (particularly to someone like me but I’d expect to most people) like he’s accusing Pelosi of either lying about praying for him, or using the phrase in the ‘bless your heart’ sense of the term. Either way, it’s inappropriate. Of him. The Lord may move in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform – but none so strange as the idea that the current Oval Office Occupier doesn’t need all the help the good Lord could summon.

Christians pray for many reasons – often personal ones, such as family or business matters, give us cause to pray – most people are familiar with the concept, even if they aren’t disposed towards religious faith themselves.

But Christians are also called upon to pray for the leadership of the church and for the wider community; and in a similar fashion for local, state, and federal governments (not – to be clear – because they agree/disagree with the people in the relevant posts) and not in the ‘bless your heart’ kinda way. Such prayers are generally that the good Lord grant to these our temporal leaders wisdom, strength, mercy, compassion, and whatever other quality that might, in a leader, be a thing devoutly to be wished. (Lots of people pray, in lots of ways, so prayer is diverse – but the above practice & attitudes are pretty widespread and certainly not in any way unusual.)

Prayer “for leadership” also isn’t about them getting things their own way thanks to a hand up from God himself but is rather associated with the act of obedience – demonstrating that you are obedient both to the heavenly laws of the Lord above and also that you respect the earthly laws that govern you down here among the mortals until he calls you home (assuming you’re lucky &/or didn’t break any major commandments, obviously…) and you wouldn’t address a ‘bless your heart’ to your deity, would you?

The point (I think) I’m trying to make here is that even if you aren’t religious & all that bit made you think was “oh, there he goes with the dog-whistle for the bible-bashing crowd” you ought to know that no, that isn’t what he was doing.

Any bible-basher worth their salt could deliver an entire sermon on nothing but how and why that isn’t what he was doing – although it’s entirely possible it’s exactly what his stable genius brain assured him he did – because what he was actually doing was putting his complete lack of knowledge and understanding of the concept and context of faith quite literally on blast.

Just for kicks, as a side dish to his full-blown toddler-with-low-blood-pressure meltdown of a “letter” to she-who-claps-sarcastically.

Like a big boy.

…God help us all.