Critics Blast Bush For Not Praying Hard Enough

From an article in The Onion:

President Bush, already facing the lowest approval ratings in history, is coming under fire from former supporters over what they call his "ineffectual and incompetent" use of prayer for national guidance and assistance. "Every time the president is criticized, he insists that the nation is in his prayers," said the Family Research Council's Bob Jensen. "That may be, but it's becoming more and more clear that these prayers are either too infrequent, too brief, or not strongly worded enough to be effective." Despite assurances from the president that he "prays every day" for the nation's interests both at home and abroad, the mounting crises of recent months-escalating gas prices, the botched Dubai port security deal, ethics scandals, and the rising death toll in Iraq-have left many unimpressed with the effectiveness of his devotion. While newly released portions of White House prayer logs show that Bush's praying has actually gone up in recent months, critics are seeking to subpoena the documents in their entirety to determine the strength of those prayers. The harshest criticisms continue to come from members of the president's conservative base, who insist that the proper devotional words must be used in prayer. "There is a real possibility that the president misrepresented the number of times he invokes Jesus' power each day in accordance with the strict guidelines of scripture," said Henry Holbrook, senior fellow at the Intercession Institute, a leading conservative prayer tank. "Is he clasping his hands together tightly enough? Is he using the proper forms of the pronouns 'thine' and 'thou'? What about the verb 'hast'?"

A joke (a good one IMHO) of course, but there is some meat there...an illustration of how the non-religious look at those of us who pray as silly...and I can almost understand it if (since?) prayer so often seems so ineffectual?