Kanye West: Truth Teller

Kanye West summed up an anger that is justified after the debacle that happened last week in New Orleans. If it had been Kennebunkport, I'm sure that President Bush would have acted a little more quickly than he did. Instead, he was off playing air guitar and celebrating Sen. John McCain's birthday.

What we do know for sure is that President Bush lacks a pastor's heart. Had he been more pastoral in his approach to this past week, things would have been dramatically different. One piece of advice given to me by a sage minister was "99% of being a good pastor is just showing up." No kidding. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be a good pastor. It just takes the ability to show up, sit for awhile, listen to the pain and tell the truth about how much it hurts.

President Bush didn't show up soon enough. When he did show up, he joked about all his post-adolescent partying in New Orleans and how one day soon he would sit on Trent Lott's new front porch once it was rebuilt. Then, he made his way back to comfy Washington DC so that he wouldn't have to deal intimately with the catastrophe that is New Orleans.

If I were stuck the awful, disgusting, prison known as the Superdome, because my home and been destroyed and I had nowhere to go, I don't think that hearing about Trent Lott's new porch would give me much sense that the President really cared about me. Come to think of it, I think it would provide me with more proof that the President is totally detached from reality.

For using his faith as a political wedge, the President seems to be lacking certain key priestly skills that Jesus exibited. He has a hard time caring about those who society sees as "the least of these" and he has an even harder time loving his neighbor as him self. Instead, he leaves all that to the "faith based community" so that he can hang out with his Halliburton friends. Speaking of which, has anyone seen the Vice President these days?