It’s heap-of-politics-links day here on Q… if you hate politics, feel free to tune out of today’s program.

Let’s start with a Tom Paine editorial on the many, many things wrong with Dubya’s proclamation of a Jesus Day in Texas. Dabbles a bit in the Constitution, recognition of minority groups, and plain religious doctrine.

Now, on to a Chicago Tribune story on how the young Texan is finding it difficult to defend his tax proposal. It appears that part of the reason Dubya wanted to stay in a character debate is that he wasn’t prepared to defend the policies he was suggesting to the American people; as I’ve talked about before, Gore’s ability to push Bush off-message is reaping benefits such as this.

Does anyone really believe that Cheney is upset about the current state of the U.S. military, seeing as he started the process of cuts and he has personally profited from the missions that he’s claiming have ruined the forces? (Oh, yeah, and by the way, Cheney is now conceding that the point made by Dubya at the Republican convention about the state of readiness of the military was wrong.)

Next comes a Bob Herbert op-ed piece on Dubya’s incredible penchant for malapropisms (regular readers of Q know what I think of his language skills). One I hadn’t read before, and possibly my current favorite: “I know how hard it is to put food on your family.”

And probably related to his limited ability to string words into sentences, Bush continues to duck a real debate schedule with Gore. Personally, my favorite aspect of all of this is the little clock in the lefthand navbar of the Gore/Lieberman site showing how long Bush has been avoiding debates.

There’s a MetaFilter thread that has started about the fact that the Anti-Defamation League has asked Lieberman to stop talking so much about religion, yet nobody has stepped in to shut Dick Cheney the hell up. To me, this is actually logical — the groups that care what the Democrats are talking about also care about whether or not they are offending others, whereas the groups that care what the Republicans are talking about seem to not care about alienating people who don’t agree with everything they’re saying. (Remember, Dubya is the guy who said that Jews can’t get into heaven…)