RAY McGOVERN to Joe Biden: Time for Confession

I’ve long trusted Ray McGovern as a truth-teller and this information is very relevant to today and deeply important for us to know. I am also not surprised by what Ray McGovern illuminates.

There’s so much about Joe Biden that the corporate media has utterly failed to inform us about. I’m so angry about how propagandized we Americans are! Too many have no idea about the pervasiveness of the failure of the mainstream media to inform us. Too many are not empowered to discern how it is that the corporate funded American media acts as a consistent mouthpiece for the powerful rather than acting to hold the powerful accountable. This deeply impaired capacity to be an informed populace costs us all deeply.

It’s my belief that there is a great need for more and more voices of truth in these times where truth and reality are often tragically on life support.

 — Molly

This piece, written by Ray McGovern for Consortium News 12 years ago, is unfortunately as relevant now regarding Joe Biden as it  was then.

 By Ray McGovern

I don’t have to remind you of the importance of the coming debate from a political perspective. But as you prepare, I invite you to spare a few minutes to look at the opportunity from a moral and religious perspective.

You may wish to examine your conscience regarding how you have acted on key foreign policy issues and reflect on John 8:32: “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

The holy days of religious traditions serve a very useful purpose, if we but take the time to pause and ponder. I write you on Rosh Hashanah, the first of 10 days focusing on repentance.

In Judaism’s oral tradition Rosh Hashanah is the day when people are held to account. The wicked are “blotted out of the book of the living,” while the righteous are inscribed in the book of life.

Those in the middle are given 10 days to repent, until the holiday of Yom Kippur — the solemn Day of Atonement.

If that has a familiar ring to it, Joe, we heard it in as many words at Mass last Sunday in the first reading, from Ezekiel 18: “If one turns from wickedness and does what is right and just, that one will live.”

Same Tradition

At Rosh Hashanah the ram’s horn trumpet blows to waken us from our slumber and alert us to the coming judgment. Rabbi Michael Lerner has been a ram’s horn for me. On Sept. 28, he sent a note addressing forgiveness and repentance.     

He encourages us to find a private place to say aloud how we’ve hurt others, and then to go to them and ask forgiveness.

“Do not mitigate or ‘explain’ — just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness,” says Rabbi Lerner. He suggests we ask for “guidance and strength to rectify those hurts — and to develop the sensitivity to not continue acting in a hurtful way.”

Again, a familiar ring. Think, Joe, about the instruction we both received as Irish “cradle Catholics.” Surely you will remember the emphasis on examining one’s conscience, confessing, and pledging to “sin no more.”

The phrase comes back, clear as a bell; we were to “confess our sins, do penance, and amend our life, Amen.” Remember?

And remember how clean we felt at the end of that therapeutic process? I was reminded of that by the gospel reading from John 1, in which Jesus says of Nathaniel: “Here is a true child of Israel; there is no duplicity in him.”

Just think of how Nathaniel must have felt.

Joe, you can feel that clean; but one cannot short-cut the process. You must first come clean on your role in greasing the skids for President George W. Bush’s war of aggression on Iraq.

I use “war of aggression” advisedly, for that is the term used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to denote “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole.”

There is no getting around that — despite the reluctance of church, state and the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) to acknowledge it.

I imagine that you, as a lawyer, have moments of acute shame over our country’s flouting of international law and the U.N. Charter, duly ratified by the Senate and thus the law of the land.

And there is no getting away from the important role you played in roping Congress into facilitating that war.

Were the war not to have killed, injured, displaced hundreds of thousands, your lame circumlocutions regarding your own culpability would be laughable — on a par with, say, some of the recent comments of your rival for vice president. But they are in no way funny. 

      
Please continue this article here: https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/15/ray-mcgovern-to-joe-biden-time-for-confession/