HARD as it is to believe now, Jerry Falwell came in second only to Ronald Reagan in a 1983 Good Housekeeping poll anointing "the most admired man in America." By September 2001, even the Bush administration was looking for a way to ditch the preacher who had joined Pat Robertson on TV to pin the 9/11 attacks on feminists, abortionists, gays and, implicitly, Teletubbies. As David Kuo, a former Bush official for faith-based initiatives, tells the story in his book "Tempting Faith," the Reverend Falwell was given a ticket to the Washington National Cathedral memorial service that week only on the strict condition that he stay away from reporters and cameras. Mr. Falwell obeyed, though once inside he cracked jokes ("Whoa, does she look frumpy," he said of Barbara Bush) and chortled nonstop...Mr. Falwell was always on the wrong, intolerant side of history. He fought against the civil rights movement and ridiculed Desmond Tutu’s battle against apartheid years before calling AIDS the "wrath of a just God against homosexuals" and, in 1999, fingering the Antichrist as an unidentified contemporary Jew.
The religious nutcases of the Republican Party are being given an annulment by moderate Republicans-I know that seems like contradiction in terms.
Electability and staying in power is now more important than strict doctrinal behavior...Mr. Perkins complained to The Wall Street Journal that the secular side of the Republican Party was serving its religious-right auxiliary with "divorce papers."...This month, even the conservative editorial page of The Journal chastised Republicans of the Perkins-Dobson ilk for being too bellicose about abortion, saying that a focus on the issue "will make the party seem irrelevant" and cost it the White House in 2008.
Hell, Brit Hume had to curtail discussion about Falwell at the Republican debate. The idea that Karl Rove could keep the Rethugs in power by serving the base is now all caca. The basic math of it is that Americans in large numbers do not support the positions of these torturers and extremists. Americans want socialized medicine, they want science and evolution taught, they want abortion legal and they want out of this goddamned war. As long as bush stays there, he drags them all down. The more stubborn he is, the more the electorate wants change.
It doesn’t help that every ten minutes a devout Republican Christian is discovered lubing his wick with some young boy. It doesn’t help that every fifteen minutes a major prediction or proclamation about Iraq or the economy turns outs to be completely wrong. It doesn’t help that Cheney supports this extreme right wing clamp down on Gay rights while his daughter is playing married to another woman and raising a child.
Ambramoff, DeLay, Terry Schiavo, The Valerie Plame Affair, Bernard Kerik, Monica Goodling didn’t help with the decision by most Republicans to turn in their Sunday Go To Church and Say Crazy Things cards.
It didn’t help the wingnuts when lightweights like Harriett Myers gets considered for a seat at the Supreme Court or that otherwise idiots are put in positions of power and their incompetence and hypocrisy is finally coming to light with a Democratic Congress. That Bush will cost them the 2008 election is not bad enough for them. He might cost them the party.
And as Martha says "That would be a good thing."
The agents of intolerance are well on their way to being forgotten, even in those cases when they, unlike Jerry Falwell, are not yet gone.
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