War On the Right

And just because you get away that don't mean its okay
You a dead man walking and I mean it okay?
--T.I.

The war is here and it's been on the down low for over a decade. During the Clinton impeachment days, the Christian right, the neocons, the fiscal conservatives and other right wing factions were able to bury their differences to take on common enemies, namely the centrist democrats and the DNC. During those days, David Frum and other right wingers would show and prove for the Christian Right, asking for respect and consideration for their beliefs and values. The Christian Right played the victim, citing religious intolerance in the secular US political atmosphere.

But what happened when the Christian Right came up? The 'intolerance' visited upon them during the 90's was visited upon every other group and has now come home to roost. As Ann Coulter asked to invade muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity, the Christian Right was pushing a domestic policy largely based on populism, anti-elitism, hyper-patriotism/soft-fascism, evangelical protestantism, while the foreign policy became based around military adventurism and crusader zeal without any understanding, planning or respect for the task at hand.

Eventually, a civil war needed to break out between the protestant evangelicals and the rest of the republican right. While the rats have been belatedly fleeing the Bush presidency, the needed civil war on the right has been a long time coming. It's like the final battle between the Socs and the Greasers in the Outsiders - it was only a matter of time. Peggy Noonan shot the first warning shot across the bow on December 14, 2007:

I wonder if our old friend Ronald Reagan could rise in this party, this environment. Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood, and had a father who belonged to what some saw, and even see, as the Catholic cult. I'm just not sure he'd be pure enough to make it in this party. I'm not sure he'd be considered good enough.

That jab was followed up by a right hook from David Frum on the 15th:

Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about. The problem is not that their answers are wrong -- that can happen to anyone. The problem is that they don't understand the questions, and are too lazy or too arrogant to learn. But say that aloud and their partisans will shout back: Elitism!

On its face, this retort is ridiculous. How exactly is it elitist to expect a candidate for president to be immune to obvious flim-flam? Or to submit his ideas to criticism--and change them if they cannot stand up?

And yet it also has to be admitted: Many of us on the conservative side have fed this monster. (Rightly) aghast at the abuse of expertise by liberal judges, liberal bureaucrats and liberal academics, we have sometimes over-reacted by denying the importance of expertise altogether.

" 'Heart' is crucial," one of George W. Bush's early evangelical supporters argued in a 2005 newspaper column. This same writer accused those conservatives who questioned Bush's "faith-based initiative" of having "holes in their souls."

So now instead of holes in our souls, we conservatives are getting candidates with holes in their heads.

That's right, we're down to the lowest common demoninator on the US right wing, while anyone who disputes stupidity is an ivory tower dwelling drug addict and idiot.

Meanwhile, in the Post, Krauthammer backs up his non-psycho hommies who got it all wrong backing up the Christianists:

Mitt Romney declares, "Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone." Barack Obama opens his speech at his South Carolina Oprah rally with "Giving all praise and honor to God. Look at the day that the Lord has made." Mike Huckabee explains his surge in the polls thus: "There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one. It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people."

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it's only going to get worse. I'd thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, "Do you believe every word of this book?" -- and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

Yep, he threw in Obama to appear non-partisan, but God takes a backseat in the Democrat campaigning, whereas he rides shotgun in the Republican debates, literature and speeches.

Get ready for a throwdown. The Republicans are headed for a bad loss at the polls in '08 and a fierce street brawl is in the works.

If you gotta problem say it to my face
We can knuckle up anytime any place
--Yung Joc