From the "Adios Supply-Side Jesus" files ..

Phoenix, July 13th, Sunday morning. Thank God John McCain has declared that he wants to wallpaper the continent with new nuke plants, because now the chances are better that this wretched slab of hot, birdshit-covered asphalt they call a state will be blown to hell in an accident someday. I hate this place. Once the sun comes up on an Arizona weekend, nothing moves except the occasional elderly-piloted Buick floating boatlike in the direction of some hideous megachurch.

This morning I've come to one of those monstrosities, North Phoenix Baptist Church, to witness John McCain's halfhearted offensive in his battle to win over the Christian right. On the stump, McCain talks about God less than any Republican politician in recent memory — certainly less than any Republican I've ever seen. The guy pitches a tent visible from a mile off whenever anyone so much as mentions the military; you can almost hear the dopamine surging into his bloodstream every time someone stands up in a town hall and begins a question by saying, "Hello, Senator, my husband was a Navy pilot. . . ." And he seems positively tumescent when talking about such horrors as Al Qaeda or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But his basic stump speech doesn't contain a single line about God or religion


The marriage of fundamentalist Christianity and the conservative movement has been a powerful force in world affairs. It has been the best smoke screen the archpriests of supply-side economics could possibly have had, giving Wall Street a populist in with the very people victimized the most by their union-busting, deregulatory policies. It turned out, for decades, that Bible-thumping Americans didn't mind having their jobs shipped to China, so long as someone was worrying about the air supply to Terri Schiavo's brain lump. As political cons go, this was the ultimate gift that kept on giving.

It all had to end sometime, though, and that sometime might be now. Nervous, white, sexually inhibited Protestants with fourth-grade educations are becoming a smaller and smaller share of the country's population, and the Christian right is increasingly frustrated with the Republican Party's failure to transform America into a fundamentalist caliphate. (Forget about abortion: After eight years of Republican rule, Christians can't even put up the Ten Commandments in Alabama without someone bitching about it.) But the last straw just might come down to one Republican politician's personal idiosyncrasies. All the party needed was one more pious, Scripture-quoting, hair-spray-soaked whore to hold this thing together for another four years, and instead they got John McCain. And John McCain may break up three decades of GOP Jesus-flogging simply because he is too afraid to get his forehead wet. Wouldn't that be something?

More Acerbic Truth from Matt Taibbi .. HERE (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/21896154/without_a_prayer) :jes:

For you ADHD types .. lets jump to the end of the piece

Watching these once-united wings of the Republican juggernaut devolve into frank mutual suspicion and distaste along the runway to almost certain electoral disaster is, of course, a delicious development. The Moral Majority Christians and the supply-side neocons always represented two of the worst and most vile impulses in the American character — mass, willful ignorance and total, shameless greed. In one wing of the ruling-party mansion they housed preachers who transformed the religion of "turn the other cheek" and "go, give away all your possessions to the poor" into a "Christianity" that celebrated shock-and-awe bombing and assault-rifle ownership and decried the progressive income tax as unfair to the propertied class. In the other wing they housed "conservatives" who turned the party of limited government into a giant snooping apparatus, one that borrowed trillions against the future earnings of ordinary taxpayers and sacrificed thousands of lives to snatch a few Middle Eastern oil wells for companies that were rich as hell to begin with.

The Bible-thumpers, mainly working- and middle-class whites with limited educations from the landlocked states of the South and the Midwest, would seem to have had little in common with the archpriests of the neoconservative movement, who as it happened were mainly Jewish academics with fancy degrees from the East and West Coasts. But they did: They shared an almost equal disdain for democracy, free speech and learning, and paradise for both groups was an intellectually mute America of vast malls, prisons packed full of ungrateful blacks, shitty TV programming to keep the brains chilled and 200-foot-high electrified fences along the Rio Grande. And lots of hero worship of soldiers, if not so much in the way of VA benefits.

This vision looked unstoppable for a while; there was a time in the early Bush years when this mean-spirited program of flag-waving, gun-toting biblical nationalism looked destined to become a kind of continental religion, a Church of America our missionaries would spread everywhere — and woe to those liberals and Frenchmen and other heretics who didn't get with the program! Then we left them in office for a while, and it turned out that our would-be nationalist priests were totally stupid and completely incompetent at running anything at all, much less the world economy. And suddenly the red states stopped looking so much red as broke and ****ed and responsible for a giant mess that even they didn't pretend to know the way out of.

It was at this low point in the Christian-corporate marriage that John McCain stepped into the breach to wreck the demographic even more. At this critical moment, the party needed a turbocharged con man to revive the old religion, and what they got was an old man with doubts who can barely bring himself to go to church on Sundays. The worst possible scenario. Or the funniest, depending on how you look at things.


Personally .. I find it funny.

The short lived romance between the steeple sheeple fundies, firearm stockpiling jingoists and the money grubbing , objectivist , freemarketeer types was one of the strangest alliances in political history

I am sure Jesus would approve of this divorce :nice:

EDIT to ADD

I called this almost 3 years ago .. yay me !

http://www.discussanything.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82012

They gots Yahweh-heads in Arizona too? Jesus.

From the "Adios Supply-Side Jesus" files ..

Nonsense. The article was long on polemic and short on fact. In fact, it seemed Taibbi was desperately trying to convince himself of the article's thesis more thesis more than anything else.

Another Hunter S. Thompson wanna-be. Except without the ability to actually write like Thompson or analyze politics like Thompson. Shit, if Taibbi had any balls he'd have loaded up on LSD and mescaline a la Thompson circa 1974 and perhaps have written something memorable about his visit to the megachurch. Instead he sounds like just another whiny, elitist *******.

More Acerbic Truth from Matt Taibbi ..

Acerbic truth? What "truth" is this? That Taibbi doesn't like white evangelical Christians very much? That he's incapable of writing above the level of insipid cliche? He sure as hell offered no evidence that the subjects of this article are either going to stay home in November or vote for anyone but McCain. Or that the Democrats have anything at all to offer these people, come to think of it.

Nonsense. The article was long on polemic and short on fact. In fact, it seemed Taibbi was desperately trying to convince himself of the article's thesis more thesis more than anything else.

Another Hunter S. Thompson wanna-be. Except without the ability to actually write like Thompson or analyze politics like Thompson. Shit, if Taibbi had any balls he'd have loaded up on LSD and mescaline a la Thompson circa 1974 and perhaps have written something memorable about his visit to the megachurch. Instead he sounds like just another whiny, elitist *******.



Acerbic truth? What "truth" is this? That Taibbi doesn't like white evangelical Christians very much? That he's incapable of writing above the level of insipid cliche? He sure as hell offered no evidence that the subjects of this article are either going to stay home in November or vote for anyone but McCain. Or that the Democrats have anything at all to offer these people, come to think of it.

Unlike your insipid, cliche filled post? LOL

What facts did he get wrong .. the fact that McSame is not religious and is uncomfortable sucking up the the religious right?

The fact that the republcan parties strange alliance of military worshiping nationalists, bible thumpers and ayn rand worshipers has fractured ?

Show us the evidence that the religious and far right are rallying behind McCain

I've always wondered at the south and southwest's obsession with all things religious...

Is it the heat? Were they left alone too long and they went strange?

Is it something evolutionary like the creatures of the Galapagos Islands, separated from others of their species, they mutated to conform to the land they inhabited ( or didn't while everything else, elsewhere did)?

Either way, I respect McCains not going strange along with them, ( Since he's already strange enough).

This obsession with a guy who's been dead for over 2,000 years, who never set foot on THIS continent, and is from a barberic culture and period which should now be emulated, complete with ritualistic cannibalism is a bit much.

Not the sort of people I would want determining who should lead the greatest military force on the face of the earth, with the largest supply of WMD on the planet.

It is a fascinating editorial piece but, as another poster has pointed out, devoid of the things I'd like to see this election cycle. Namely, facts and honest policy talk.

You should have posted that in the Whine cellar.



Just sayin'

Political Humor is as old as Politics and no less devoid of truth than dry, somniferous, political analysis


You should have posted that in the Whine cellar.

Just sayin'


we have quite the humorless bunch here .. just sayin'

Considering the pure fact that republicans had control of virtually EVERY aspect of our government, and created wall to wall crisis on every front imaginable, it is reasonable to conclude that the ideology of conservatism is a quaint concept which doesn't stand up to real world practicalities, and much of the legislation enacted by them in the last 7 1/2 years should be re-examined and reversed.

This should be the focus of Congress under a new administration to be resolved along side of working out our withdrawal from Iraq, and concluding the little matter of actually answering the attacks of 9/11, and paying down the historic debt left by a failed presidency.

You have to admit, there's not too much to laugh at these days with people not being able to afford medical care, meds, cars, heating oil, insurence, retirement, food, or education untainted by religious nuttery.

There's a lot of work to be done and it SHOULD be done with recognition of how we got to where we are and who is responsible for getting us here.

Appropriate laws should be enacted accordingly ( restricting the activities of those who have placed our nation at risk.)