As a practicing Roman Catholic I think I can give a decent answer to this question. Properly speaking Lent is all about penance. It's a simple acknowledgement that you've done things that are wrong, and you know it. OK, you want to be forgiven for your sins. But what do you feel like you've done that's a sin? How do you define sin? A violation of one of the Ten Commandments? One of the traditional seven cardinal sins? That would be greed, or gluttony, or adultery, or........damn, I don't know this particular list of sins because it's not the way I was taught. Personally I have never had a standard list of sins, I just confess stuff that I feel like has gotten between me and God. That's how I was taught to confess, and politics has never been directly involved. Maybe I hated Jerk Lawmaker X too much. It depends on who you support and who you don't. Although I'm not a Bush supporter I don't hate the guy. It's not personal with me. I disagree with some of his policies. I'll have to see how successful this war is in terms of goals, actually getting Saddam the hell out of power, something the first Iraqi war didn't do, and giving Iraq a democratic state. Neither one of these goals has been accomplished yet. If they get rid of Saddam and the Iraqi people are genuinely happy about it, great. If they get to choose their own leaders with clean, honest, democratic elections, great. None of this has happened yet. Will it? We'll see. It's the uncertainty of the whole thing that some of us are either nervous or confused about or both. In other words, will the closure of this action bring the desired results? I hope so but there's no guarantee that it will just yet.
