Self-righteous Contempt is Bankrupt.

The now-famous ad run by the RNC slandering the Tennesseean US House candidate Harold Ford has been called racist by the NAACP. RNC spokesman Danny Diaz says "I won't even maintain the premise" that the ad is racially offensive.

Read the LaTimes article.

Watch the ad here.

The pitiful thing about this ad is that even if you could convince the world it's not racist, which it is, you'd be elevating the ad to the status of vile and contemptuous, but not racist, advertising.

We're in desperate times, living amidst war and impoverishment, despair and meaninglessness, but the people asking to be our leaders are not talking about a bright future, a vision for a better world. Everybody's just talking about how god-awful the other guy is.

Read or listen to NPR's coverage of this phenomena.

In church we get ourselves in a similar mess, when we focus on the nastiness of sins, typically of the internal, moralistic variety. Somehow calling out bad behavior takes the place of offering a vision of unbridled love and radical hospitality in the kingdom of God, and the church thus inverts the teaching and example of Jesus.

Most Americans express very little faith that politicians and government do good in the world. Why would we, when all we see and hear is mudslinging during the seasons we choose our nation's leaders?

The exquisite irony with contemporary political campaigning is that most of the grand efforts candidates make to contrast their virtues against their opponents' vice actually contribute to the feeling in the citizenry that "all politicians are the same."

The reasons so many stay away from the polls on election day are not too different from the reasons so many stay away from church.