I pledge allegiance...

...to my own personal Congressman, Jim McDermott.

There's a reason Jim is referred to as "Congressman for life." That's because most all of us here in his district will vote for him as long as he asks us to. We'll do that for a lot of reasons. For his principled stand against needless war, his consistent support for universal health care, his fidelity to basic Democratic stands on reproductive choice, the right to organize and need to preserve the social safety net in our country.

And we'll do it even when he makes an absent minded, or even bone headed, mistake while leading the pledge of allegiance.

Yep, Jim's making headlines again, this time for excising "under God" from his recitation of the pledge in Congress the other day. He says his mind was focused on an upcoming one minute speech and he just rattled off the pledge the way he learned it in grade school and recited it for the first 17 years of his life. Frankly, I believe him. Jim McDermott has made a career out of standing firm on controverial ground. He's not inclined to weasel his way around this kind of thing, because he doesn't have to. He's going to get the requisite 50% +1 (actually, more likely 70% +1) from his constituents either way.

And then there are the facts of his life. He's been a professed Christian for over 60 years. He boasts of having been a Wheaton College classmate of Billy Graham's. He's a member of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, where he can actually be found on periodic Sunday mornings when he's in town. (Which Methodist congregation does the Christian in Chief belong to again? Oh, yeah, that's right...)

In a way, I'm kind of pleased to see the R's trying to make political hay out of this, because they're wasting ammo on a target they can't hurt. But he's my own personal Congressman, dammit, so I wish they'd just leave him alone...