Democrats wandering in the wilderness

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This is a blurb from Howard Dean's speech accepting the chair of the Democratic National Committee. It seems to have been intended to appeal to religious types like myself who would recognise the biblical reference. It just made me wince at the clumsiness of it.
Republicans wandered around in the political wilderness for 40 years before they took back Congress. But the reason we lost control is that we forgot why we were entrusted with control to begin with.

The American people can't afford to wait for 40 years for us to put Washington back to work for them.

It can't take us that long.

(The rest of the speech can be found here.)

The phrasing of this bit of the speech was no doubt intended to bring to mind the chosen people of God wondering in the wilderness after they had escaped captivity in Israel. Someone must have thought it would be a good way to throw a bone to the religious types. You know, show everybody how moral and values centered the Democrats can be. But this is just one more example of why politicians should stop trying to use religion to get over on the people. Especially when they don't seem to understand the religious references they try to invoke.

Does Dean know why the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness? Because they screwed up and didn't do what God told them to do. They doubted God and chickened out when it came time to make the relatively short trip into the promised land. Does Dean know why the Israelites wandered for 40 long years? So that the generation that sinned against God would die in the wilderness as punishment for their sins. Does Dean know what happened once the Israelites finally made it into the promised land? One offense against God after another until they finally got themselves carted off into captivity as punishment.

That doesn't paint the Democrats in a very good light in my mind.

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