With Rhetoric Like That

The news grabbing open letter to President Bush from some Calvin College alumni, students, faculty, and friends has these two paragraphs in the middle:

By their deeds ye shall know them, says the Bible. Your deeds, Mr. President–neglecting the needy to coddle the right, desecrating the environment, and misleading the country into war–do not exemplify the faith we live by.

Moreover, many of your supporters are using religion as a weapon to divide our nation and advance a narrow partisan agenda. We are deeply disappointed in your failure to renounce their inflammatory rhetoric.

Kind of like the inflammatory rhetoric used in your above paragraph?

These have to be two of the most interesting paragraphs I've ever seen next to each other. In the first paragraph, the signers use the Bible and inflammatory rhetoric to criticize Bush, seemingly saying that his stances on economics, the environment, and the Iraq are unbiblical.

The next paragraph bemoans conservative Christians for using religion to divide (no instances given) even though in the previous paragraph they use religion to divide. They call on Bush to renounce the rhetoric of the right when they used the rhetoric of the left two sentences earlier. So mature.

I find it sad that all the graduates and teachers who signed on for this ad weren't able to see the blatant hypocrisy in this letter.