“Evangelical Duh-Thena

Emerging Fully-Formed from the Head of the Dear Leader.”

Or, how Andy Sullivan views the Universe.

Like the All!!! New!!! Tom Friedman v2.0 who pretended to emerge from his Neocon chrysalis yesterday and wander the boulevards of the NYT like a newly bliss-punched Mescalindiana Jones exploring some lost and magical continent(“OMG look at my hands! Look how dainty yet meaty they are! And, OMG, lookit that gum wrapper! How silvery like an alloy angel it smells! How minty it looks! Like the Wintergreen Life Savers that were always left over in the Christmas Holiday Box after all the good ones [Butter Rum. Mmmm.] were gone! And OMG, look at what a complete, idiotic disaster Bush is! Golly, I wonder how the fuck that happened!”), I am delighted that Andy Sullivan as taken up the flaming sword (insert 1 million jokes here) of Righteousness against his former collaborators.

But, like Friedman yesterday, I am...confused.

Because I take comments like this from Sullivan's blog this morning:

"If a religious leader has a personal inclination toward homosexuality - and nonetheless can look past his own inclination to defend the institution of marriage and to affirm its benefits for the raising of children - why should he likewise not be honored for his intellectual firmness and moral integrity?" - David Frum on National Review.

We're seeing these people reveal themselves very clearly now, aren't we?

And these from Friday:

A patriarchal leader, isolated at the top, with a personality cult, and removed from normal accountability structures. The person "begins to feel he is bullet-proof, can do no wrong." Hmmm.

Here's what you are being asked to believe: Haggard never had sex and never used crystal meth. Bush never ordered torture. The insurgency is in its last throes. Michael Brown did a "heckuva job." And Rummy is doing a "fantastic job."

These people cannot self-correct. They'll lie and lie and lie to protect their psychic order. So they have to be corrected.

And

In case you haven't been keeping up with one of James Dobson's right-hand men, Ted Haggard. He has now admitted that he bought crystal meth from a male massage therapist. He has taped a video about the joys of heterosexual marriage. He denies ever having sex with a man with whom he was naked in a hotel room. He says he threw the meth away…

And I ask myself, “In what Alternate Universe has Andrew Sullivan been vacationing lo these last 25 years that he is only now becoming dimly aware that racists and Dominionists have owned and operated the GOP since before Justin Timberlake was born?”

Because I am glad Sully endorsed Kerry in 2004. And I’m glad he has found at least a sliver of the True Cross to hang his Republican ball-gag on, but I sincerely cannot help but wonder this:

Where in the fuck have you been for the last quarter of a century, Andy?

These people did not just pop out of Dubya’s forehead yelling “Surprise!” 24 month ago; Dubya and Allen and Santorum and Reed and Tancredo and Schmidt and Newt all of the rest of them -- now too numerous to count -- have been oozing out of the tiny heads, anthracite hearts, and massively abridged Bibles of the Evangelicals and bigots and taking over state legislatures, PTAs, library and school boards, newspapers, the courts and more and more of the federal government since long before Saint Ronnie ascended to the Throne.

Or to both make the point and save myself some keystrokes, let me just drop in what I wrote last summer:

...
To them I commend their attention to any one of Harlan Ellison’s brilliant essay’s on the subject, but, since I happen to be sitting here holding a fairly hard-to-find copy of his “Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed”, let me share with you just a snip of a piece called “Fear Not Your Enemies”. Harlan writes,

“I’ve had it up the here with Rev. Jerry Falwell...and all the rest of those TV clowns perverting the tenets of Judeo-Christian ethos with their non-specific mumble about moral rectitude...

They want to censor books and movies and tv and magazines to fit some ancient, worn-out idea of purity...”

This is very brief (not enough to get a real taste of the pungency of his writing) and he has similar stuff about Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich in different volumes, but I bring these sentences from this essay this to your attention only because of the year it was published.

1980.

A quarter of a century ago.

That’s at least how long these sleek, disease-bearing rodents have been gnawing away at the heart of your Party. Getting fat and taking over while the Moderates told us all not to worry.

Sorry, but after a quarter of a century of having your teeth beaten down your throats by the same monsters, time's up. You are not making a heroic stand any more, or secretly turning the tide. After 25 years you no longer qualify as anything but an abused spouse, still putting up with a thug that you have to apologize for by day and cringe in fear from by night.

And he knows you’ll never really leave, which is why he knows he owns you. Why he knows he can open up your skull with a claw hammed all he wants; you’ll always come crawling back for more.

Every year he gets stronger and more berserk, and you pick up more scars and compound fractures...and then tell yourself you’ll give him just ONE MORE chance, and I’m here to tell you that you can leave, or you can end up in the morgue, but there is no third choice anymore.

And frankly, after 25 years of pretending it’s not happening or pretending that it is ever gong to get anything but worse, I’ve got to ask you just what in the FUCK you are waiting for?

So why has it taken you this long to do the math, Andy?

Take away the howling mad mobs of white, Southern racists that have been diligently and deliberately recruited into the GOP since 1964…

Take away the single-issue, NRA freaks…

And then take away the millions upon million of Conservative Evangelicals who are programmed to hate who and how they are told to hate by Falwell and Dobson and Perkins and Robertson...

Take away all of the dreg of humanity and what remains? A handful of Conservative elite and their pasty, privileged, think-tank, vat-grown whelplings who believed they could lash this nation’s klansmen, homophobes, theocrats and other short-bus true believer in harness together under one whip and drive themselves to the Randite Promised Land.

Take away Rush's pig people and Jerry's orc army who obediently vote and pay and pray and stuff envelopes as they are told, and the smug, soul-satisfied purr of George Will and Bill Buckley taking a decent dump once in a blue moon is the only Conservative “movement” you have left.

So how did you not notice this 1,000-mile-high bag of flaming dog shit that has been burning and stinking on the porch of the Republican Party for the last 25 years?

And why do people still pay you to opine about anything anymore?