Landover Baptist interviews Mrs. Joel Osteen

An excerpt:

After 72 hours of unsuccessfully attempting to decipher a secret message to al-Qaeda, the Department of Homeland Security released to the public today an audio-taped telephone conversation between Mrs. Harry (Heather) Hardwick, of Landover Baptist Church, and Mrs. Joel (Victoria) Osteen, of some church in Texas. The government had secretly wiretapped the December 20, 2005 exchange pursuant to the Patriot Act based on officials’ well-founded belief that Mrs. Osteen’s outburst aboard a Continental jet earlier in the day constituted a terrorist threat by a couple with suspected al-Qaeda ties. ...

Heather: ... Apparently, there remains a patchwork of folks who still believe in those obscure New Testament verses that say we should give our money to the poor -- or, at the very least, not take money from the poor to make ourselves rich. They obviously don’t understand contemporary Christian capitalism.

Victoria: It chaps my hide, Heather! Joel has worked his rump off, wining and dining book publishers and construction investors. We built the largest church in the country so we could be rich and fam---

Heather: Second largest, dear. I know it’s tempting to exclude Landover Baptist from the list, given that churches like yours aren’t even remotely in the same league in terms of size or quality. You can, however, claim to be the nation’s largest non-denominational church with a non-message.

Victoria: Pardon me?

Heather: Let’s face facts, love. You have a large following because your hubbie doesn’t preach anything that could be deemed even remotely controversial to anyone. I loved his leap into network television when Larry King asked his opinion on abortion and homosexuality, and he refused even to condemn those vile acts, responding with a line typically reserved for hair stylists and florists: “I don’t go there.” He even refused to affirm that only Christians will go to Heaven. Some may call that blasphemy, but I refuse to judge, particularly since I rarely have occasion to travel to abandoned sports arenas in Texas to do my worshipping.

Victoria: We have a positive message, Heather. We teach people that as long as they love God and have faith in themselves, they can lead the best life possible now.

Heather: While that kind of line may work in Susan Powter infomercials and dime store psychology books principally sold in rural Wal-Marts, it is hardly enough to sustain an operation as ostentatiously gargantuan as yours. Since your so-called message is little more than the opening minute of an Oprah special, you have to ensure that your congregation worships and idolizes you. There can be no more slip-ups, Vi!

Victoria: But many opinion leaders have backslid in their private lives, and their followers forgave them.

Heather: That is because they committed to definite positions, hon. Because a man of God like Rush Limbaugh condemns everyone who isn’t a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, wealthy, heterosexual male, he can become a hillbilly heroin/hydrocodone addict and his fans don’t mind, because they love his message of hate and animosity too much to abandon him, no matter what his indiscretions. When Brothers Falwell and Robertson say something utterly ridiculous (which is a fairly regular event), we overlook it because these devout leaders condemn everyone who isn’t like us.

Victoria: But we want to embrace everyone, Heather.

Heather: That’s apparent, Vickie. To ensure that as many people as possible join your “Church of the Generic Message,” you stand for nothing substantive, thereby making certain you don’t alienate anyone (except people wise enough to recognize the absence of substance). To accomplish this in the long-term, you must make yourselves so loveable and beyond reproach that people embrace you despite your complete lack of ideology. Pulling a Leona Helmsley on a commercial airplane just won’t cut it.

Christmas Eve-Eve drive-by blogging

Since we'll all be busy living our lives offline for the next few days, here are some tide-me-overs ...

-- In Oaxaca Mexico, they're taking time off from the recent strife to celebrate Noche de Rábanos; Night of the Radishes. Do NOT miss seeing the pictures.

-- "Flogs", blogs that are actually promotional campaigns for products, stores, even opinion influence, are lately all the rage. They happen to be a violation of federal law, specifically the Federal Trade Commission guidelines protecting consumers against misleading information.

-- Yesterday's holiday weekend document dump included the admission that the Department of Homeland Security violated the Privacy Act -- back in 2004 when it was first caught by the GAO -- by collecting too much information from US airline passengers.

Do you feel safer yet?

-- It appears that a US president did have bin Laden in his gunsights, as the ABC docu-drama "Path to 9/11" revealed, but the president was Bush and not Clinton.

-- I give our local paper a hard time, but they have some interesting news up lately (these links will be good for a week or two before the Chron moves them into the pay-per-view archives) ...

• The Selective Service System is testing its military draft machinery for the first time since 1998.
• Accenture didn't exactly get fired from their state contract, but they lost a lot of it. For essentially shitty performance. You may know Accenture as the former Andersen Consulting, of the now-defunct Arthur Andersen accounting firm (the biggest loser in the Enron affair).
• Texas gained almost 600,000 new residents this year. That is nearly the sum of one Congressional district. About 160,000 came from Louisiana alone. One word: Katrina.
• Loren Steffy reminds us that the cost of our employer-provided health insurance isn't just a financial one.
• On September 11, 1977, Bing Crosby and David Bowie sang the duet Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy for a Christmas TV special. Bing died of a heart attack a month later. But the song nearly didn't happen because Ziggy Stardust hated Little Drummer Boy and didn't want to sing it.

-- Barack Obama isn't considered by many African-Americans as "one of us". A startling and somewhat fascinating opinion here (from a white boy's POV, anyway) . I don't know whether this is insightful deconstruction or a destructive whisper campaign. I cannot imagine that this sort of thing would keep anyone from voting for him, but I would still be interested in the responses to this article from African-American readers of this blog.

The Great Wall lays down the smack

Our man just keeps on improving, his game and his English.



Tip of the backwards cap to HouStoned.

Fox News to surge forces in War on Christmas

"FNC will present a three hour primetime O’Reilly Factor Christmas Marathon beginning on Monday, December 25th at 8PM EST," a Fox News release states. Also, Shoutin' Sean Hannity will host a one-hour special, "A Nashville New Year", starring several of country music's leading Republican freaks.

Under the President's directive to "go shopping more", Orally will no doubt release some casualty figures related to victory, such as ...

-- the number of credit card accounts maxed out

-- the percentages of parking lot capacities at shopping malls around the country during the week before Christmas, and

-- a panel of pundits predicting the amount of the next rise in interest rates by the Fed due to inflation fears.