The three men I admire the most

We still don't really know how to interpret the spectacle of Presidential candidate John Kerry being flailed for the conformity or lack thereof between his religion and his politics while Dubya sails serenely on through war and poverty still wearing his best Pharisee face for services every Sunday. But with our current recommended reading being Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, we found ourselves asking the following. The media have allowed Dubya to draw a distinction between the role of Jesus as his personal Saviour and the role of God has an endower of fundamental rights to all people, rights which Dubya then may choose to facilitate via such measures as the war in Iraq.

But...but...then we think of MacCulloch's extended accounts of disputes between different branches of Christianity, in which much ink was spilled over the concept of the Trinity. And as far as we can tell, most Christian denominations, including Dubya's Methodism, subscribe to the general idea of the Trinity, in which Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are three manifestations of the SAME BEING. So, is someone going to ask Dubya then to explain the difference between his acknowledged mission from God to bring freedom to all peoples and the implied identical terms of reference for that mission from Jesus? We're sure the Islamic clerics would like to know.