Signs Of The Apocalypse?

I admit it. I'm stumped.

Ever since that phony bastard Mohammed ElBaradei squeaked by him for the Nobel Peace Prize, my man Bono seems to be a bit off his feed. As Gawker recently noted, even his trademark peace sign seems half-a**ed.










First he's seen hob-nobbing with The Shrub - what's up with that?

Bono has criticized President Bush when he thought the president was not doing enough. But he also gives Dubya credit for the administration's large increases in foreign aid -- which many other leftists don't want to do. In fact, Bono told The Chronicle, "I think I'm a pretty good judge of character" and as for President Bush, with whom he recently had lunch at the White House, "I really believe he has this (helping and healing Africa's poor) in his mind and heart."

Bono noted that because of a Bush push, 250,000 Africans are using the antiretroviral drugs now, when zero Africans were using them a year before. "It is an amazing thing he's pulled off. Three years ago, people would laugh openly, in your face, at the idea that we could work with the (Bush) administration on this stuff."

Overall, the Bush administration has trebled American aid for Africa. That's big.

Then he starts going easy on the snake-handlers:

What do you think of the evangelical movement that we see in the United States now?

I'm wary of faith outside of actions. I'm wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world.

Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn't believe it. It almost ruined it for me -- 'cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS.

I've started to see this community as a real resource in America. I have described them as "narrow-minded idealists." If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, these people want to change the world. They want their lives to have meaning. And it's one of the things that the Democratic Party has missed out on. You know, so much of the moral high ground in the past was Democratic: FDR, RFK, Cesar Chavez. Now I suppose it's Hillary's passion for cheaper medical care. And Teddy Kennedy, of course.

Well of course.

I was at a complete loss to explain Bono's inexplicable change of heart, until I happened across this story. It would seem that Bono has gone over to the Dark Side. No more will he be keepin' it real for those of us who wander the soul-less boulevards of broken dreams, pondering the essential hopelessness of life in a full-employment economy controlled by Republicans. But there is still one dark ray of despondency to be found for those who long for the bliss of existential anomie: