Free Republic

Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it's all-American rape and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. Mmm, patriotism. The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It's all flag-draped coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol whippings and miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just men -- with wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to stand up for hours and days on end until their feet swell and their lungs collapse and their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned death-drunk nation cry: Hey, whatever happened to our nice,...

Perhaps you, like so many across the planet, are more than a bit baffled by the runaway success of "The Passion of the Christ." Perhaps you, furthermore, are more than slightly disturbed that millions have flocked to this bizarre ultraviolent blood-drenched revisionist flick and that so many actually believe its story to be absolutely true, and that it just surpassed "The Return of the King" in total box office and is the No. 8 most successful film of all time and it was No. 1 again across BushCo's flyover states during Easter weekend and has sold 650,000 books and 125,000...

<p>Kneel down. Put your hands together. Offer thanks right this very moment to whatever deity you desire that that you are not 18 years old and gay and living in the state of Kansas right now.</p> <p>This gratitude, it is a given. This is so much of a given you might not even need to hear why. You just say to yourself, oh my freaking God, I can only imagine.</p>

<p>Of course it's all just glittery New Age froufrou moonbeam crapola that don't mean nuthin'. Sure it is.</p> <p>Of course it's all just easily dismissible astrological hooey, just another big everyday lunar eclipse that just so happens to coincide with an incredibly rare and unusual and truly beautiful planetary configuration that, if you believe the signs, heralds a potentially enormous and profound spiritual awakening for humans (that's you) not seen since 1987's famous Harmonic Convergence, and not really even then.</p>