Looks like Howard Dean is still getting the hang of that whole Jesus thing he was so big on last week. Check out this exchange:
“Please tone down the garbage, the mean mouthing, the tearing down of your neighbor and being so pompous,” Ungerer told the former Vermont governor and Democratic front-runner. “You should help your neighbor and not tear him down.”
“George Bush is not my neighbor,” Dean replied.
“Yes, he is,” Ungerer said, to which Dean responded: “You sit down. You’ve had your say and now I’m going to have my say.”
Leave aside the rudeness to a questioner who was, in fairness, something of a heckler (although we expect our politicians to suffer fools a little more gladly than this). If Dean had a shred of Christianity about him, he’d recognize the absurdity of saying that President Bush “is not my neighbor.” The whole point of Jesus’ discussion of the concept of “love thy neighbor” in the parable of the Good Samaritan is that your neighbor isn’t always who you want it to be.
Dean could have sidestepped this, of course, by pointing out that this isn’t personal between him and the other candidates, that as a candidate for public office he has to give first priority to laying the facts before the voters, etc. But he had to go one step further and basically say that Bush is beyond the realm of decent folk to whom one owes even the slightest shred of human compassion. As I’ve discussed before, Christianity demands more even for Saddam Hussein (although Dean does, at least, feel he owes some measure of fairness to Osama bin Laden). It’s one thing to say that that’s hard to live up to — it is. But by declaring that Bush is not his neighbor at all, all Dean is really doing is declaring that he’s no Christian of any type.