The slander machine

God, I am such a terrible Buddhist, lost in samsara! Do I keep my equanimity and thoughts of loving-kindness when I read the slanders that, say, Bob Newman, a hack Denver radio personality, has directed against Cindy Sheenan, accusing her of consorting with traitors and communists, and of demeaning her own dead son? No. Instead I sent him the following email. This is shameful behavior, for a Buddhist.

I have not heard back.

---------------

Hi, Bob,

Mr. Bush is taking a public relations beating on this one, and he is afraid to come out of his fake ranch to talk to her, because she has proved herself quick on her feet and articulate, having sent his apparatchiks back to ranch headquarters crestfallen after being told they were smart enough to know they were lying, exactly the right thing to say at the right time; and I think he as afraid to come through with his usual bullying by actually having her arrested the way his secret service boys threatened (what a PR disaster that would be!)
So all that is left to him is to crank up the tried and true slander machine, and evidently word has duly gone out to the sock puppets and zombiebots like yourself--did you actually get orders from your handlers or are you simply genetically engineered with the DNA of pond algae, to know instinctively how to do your master's bidding, the way a cancer cell knows how to metastasize?

But wait! If it is the the former, you are unlikely to be forthcoming about it, and if the latter, you can no more know your real purpose in life than can a nostoc spore, so it is vain and foolish of me to ask. What a grotesque mistake on my part!

So sorry.

cheers,

Jim McCulloch

------

Update: I did hear back. Bob reproached me, via email, for being ruled by hatred. Well, Samsara is indeed all about greed, hatred, and delusion, as all Buddhists know well, and I confess I fall headlong into samsara on a daily basis, though I can say fairly I am not actually ruled by it. My problem is that I get too easily stirred at injustice. Sadly, I am not the Dalai Lama.

So I wrote back, still deep in Samsara:

Dear Bob,

You gotta lot of nerve, my excellent Republican friend, accusing someone of "hatred" after having slimed Cindy Sheenan by declaring, with the license God seems to give the terminally unjust and the mad, that she not only demeans--sweet Jesus!--her own dead son, but that she is in favor of disembowelment and rape of children! Have you no shame?

We both know the answer.

Cheers, Jim