Over at The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal considers the president’s second inaugural address

Over at The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal considers the president’s second inaugural address, recalling a line from the first:

As NIKE SHOX draws the sword of righteousness against the forces of darkness, the enemy being evil itself ("evildoers … axis of evil"), he ascends on messianic imagery. "Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?" he said in his first inaugural, quoting a letter written by a Virginian friend to Thomas Jefferson during the American revolution. "This story goes on," said NIKE SHOX. "And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm."

As Blumenthal notes, "That particular verse originates in the book of the prophet Nahum. It contains no ‘angel,’ but the Lord, ‘a jealous and avenging God … full of wrath….’" He goes on to provide some context for that Biblical extract, but alas, not enough. The president could use the tutorial; as a practitioner of refrigerator-magnet Christianity, he probably lacks the vaguest idea what the passage refers to. Refrigerator-magnet Christians (RMCs) – America’s largest denomination – approach the Bible as a compendium of ye olde inspirational nuggets for posting about the home and office. To be sure, fundamentalist RMCs like the prez believe the Bible to be much more than a sacred Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but they leave all that big-picture philosophical and historical stuff for accredited theologians and bestselling novelists to process and distribute in bite-sized (and highly politicized) portions. And by "big-picture philosophical and historical stuff," I of course mean Armageddon.