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A Joke about God, and Hurricanes, and Budgets and Things

I will tell you a joke.  


No, I will let Michele Bachmann tell it.  She is really funny.  You will really laugh!  


"I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians.  We've had an earthquake, we've had a hurricane.  He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'  Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now.  They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending."


Get it?  


Well, it goes something like this:  God sends messages to us.  God sends earthquakes, causing a lot of damage, and hurricanes, too.  The last one--which could have been a lot worse--killed about three dozen people, and did an enormous amount of flooding damage, especially in Vermont.  Millions of people without electricity.  That sort of thing.  It is just God's way of trying to get our attention.  Sort of like a train wreck as a way to slow down traffic.  


Michele says that's the joke part.  She herself did not mean to say that God did it for the government spending business.  That was . . . oh, just kind of an analogy!  She really meant to say that the American people are trying to get our attention about spending, just the way God sends death and destruction to get our attention about gays in the military and weddings and things.  She did not mean to say that God gives a good god-damn about budgets!  It wouldn't make sense, would it, for God to send death and destruction of property by causing property damage, which itself would only make the budget worse?  


So we ought to cut government spending right now!  Cut taxes!  Stop all that unemployment benefits stuff!  Starve government back into shape.  Maybe, as Ron Paul suggests, get rid of federal programs to help when there are natural disasters.  Take up a collection for kids who need clothes.  Get our priorities in order!


Then--then-when the flood waters recede, we should ask ourselves what God really had in mind when he made the earth shake up and down the east coast, and what he really had in mind when he made that hurricane skip up through the Caribbean, up the east coast, and all the way into Ontario.  A good, god-fearing people cannot ignore God's messages when they come, like that, killing people and flooding basements and blowing boats up on the rocks, and expect to remain God's chosen people forever!  No sir!  When God talks like that, we should pay attention!


It is just petty politics to say that when Michele told her little jest that she meant that God was thinking about our unbalanced budgets.  God doesn't send little signals about things like that.  God shakes the earth and infuriates the wind because he has something really important in mind, and we should try to think what it is.  Probably that gay thing!  Maybe not going to Sunday School.  More likely, something about abortion, or pre=marital sex between consenting adults of the opposite sex, or maybe socialist, marxist-style labor unions.  Could be the minimum wage requirement.  


It is a tough and mysterious world for those of us who do not understand how God speaks to us through thunder and lightning and burning bushes and tornadoes and flooded basements. Most of us are not very good at interpreting the hints and signs sent by the Good Lord.


Quit joking around, Michele!  Help us here!  Why did God take down all those old, covered bridges?  There is a moral to this story, isn't there?  Did God ever send an earthquake and a hurricane when we had a white President?  Is that just a coincidence, or what?

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