Democrats vs. Theocrats
The Times has an interesting juxtaposition today.The Good Guy
From Deborah Solomon's interview in the Magazine:
The strongest part of your book argues that Democrats are in desperate need of savvier consultants, their own Karl Rove, to help them build [sic--remember Florida 2000] a political majority. Why would you want them to be more like Republicans?The dark overlords of the authoritarian cultist Sith
[KOS] To get their message out, the Republicans created this entire conservative noise machine. They have Fox News and The Washington Times and the 700 Club and just about the entire talk-radio dial. They have this incredible ability to promote whatever the big issue of the day is. There is no partisan liberal media that is working in concert with the Democratic Party in order to sell whatever the party is selling.
From Allan Brinkley's review of Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy in the Book Review:
On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.Oh, and this little lagniappe from Brinkley:
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. [Phillips] convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public.
Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.Tranlation: "They can't be serious." When, oh when, will we learn to take these people at their word?
It will be, indeed, a long war.
NOTE Of course, the blogosphere (in particular, farmer) has been all over christianism from before beginning. So it's nice to see Phillips join the analytical mainstream on this one.
UPDATE Rapture Index closes down 2 on Oil and lack of activity in Kings of the East. See, oil prices dropped, so the rapture is farther away. So it's bad that oil prices dropped... Maybe we really need look no further than these loons for the source of the malAdministration's blac-is-white-ism.
posted by Lambert @ 3/19/2006 10:47:00 AM
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