The Golden Drool

It's even odds that Frank Rich susses Bible Spice's Palm Pilot gambit correctly, that she intended to get "caught", knowing that she'd be lampooned by all the right people. From day one the rap on Miss Thang was that she made ol' Fredo look bright by comparison, but like Fredo, Palin has benefited from the "stupider like a fox" syndrome -- the bar gets set so low, it becomes almost impossible to fall below it.

Worse yet, Palin is uniquely unencumbered by the usual expectations of making at least a semi-coherent argument in at least a pretense of good faith. Not only do her fans not expect such basic graces from her, they would probably disdain her if she did suddenly start saying things that happened to be true and/or correct. Ordinarily you would say this is the garden-variety "red meat" crowd, but she doesn't even give them that. It's just low-grade rhetorical gruel, a sloppy word salad of cognitive dissonance and predictable buzzwords.

Like any demagogue worth the appellation, Palin is adept at wrapping her platitudes in the usual mindless, meaningless pieties, phrases that would probably be more troubling if she actually meant them.

Her only concrete program for dealing with America’s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. “It would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,” she said, “so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.”

To listen to them, you'd assume that all these fucking people do in the first place is pray. So if it hasn't been working, why is it supposed to work in the future? Not that it would even occur to Palin or any of her drones to ask, much less answer such a question, but certainly serves as a prime example of the sheer mindlessness of mass-consumption pseudo-Christianity.

Another fine illustration of this is Michael Gerson, Fredo's former wordsmith and permanent conservatard catamite. Gerson may consider himself an evangelical Christian, but it's possible that his deity may not think that word means what Gerson thinks it means:

"Guantanamo" has become a synonym for "prison." Actually, it is a 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base, complete with a McDonald's and a Subway. The Guantanamo Bay Children and Youth Program sounds like a violation of the Geneva Conventions. But there are families stationed here needing child care. The Navy conducts operations against drug running and human trafficking. The base is now a major transit point for supplies headed to Haiti.

Yes, and people have been tortured and force-fed and suicided there as well, without charge nor trial nor representation. Some of them were teenagers and illiterate shepherds sold for bounty. If some of them are in fact terrorists, let us prove it and dispense with legalistic niceties forthwith. Ending legitimate terrorists is not the problem; perpetually housing them in limbo is.

Gerson may enjoy conjuring up Nuremberg trial imagery, but he might want to consider that we executed enemy soldiers for some of the exact same tactics that we have been employing at Guantanamo and at black sites around the world. You would think that a devout Christian would be more well-versed in the nuances and pitfalls of symbology, but Palin, again bereft of ontological encumbrances such as consistency in religious principles, reflects the intellecual path for most of the publicly pious, including Gerson. Orwell's promise of the boot stamping on a human face forever would not be possible without enabling pigs such as Gerson, acting as if the presence of a sandwich franchise negates eight years of black ops and redacted autopsies.

Meanwhile, the cornpone fascists are well-entrenched in the indoctrination of the public textbook industry, a robust cash scheme if ever there was one. This is where the next generation of god- (and nation-)bothering poltroons gets (in)bred.

The other nonacademic expert, David Barton, is the nationally known leader of WallBuilders, which describes itself as dedicated to “presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on our moral, religious and constitutional heritage.” Barton has written and lectured on the First Amendment and against separation of church and state. He is a controversial figure who has argued that the U.S. income tax and the capital-gains tax should be abolished because they violate Scripture (for the Bible says, in Barton’s reading, “the more profit you make the more you are rewarded”) and who pushes a Christianity-first rhetoric. When the U.S. Senate invited a Hindu leader to open a 2007 session with a prayer, he objected, saying: “In Hindu [sic], you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods. And certainly that was never in the minds of those who did the Constitution, did the Declaration when they talked about Creator.”

Their interpretations are as pathological as their inane crusade to force everyone to kowtow to their tedious obsessions. As they do with the bible, these douche-nozzles selectively read and interpret Jefferson and Washington so that they somehow happen to tell them what they wanted to hear in the first place. I mean, who really gives a shit exactly how devout the founding fathers were anyway? They also believed that blacks were three-fifths of a person and women were property. This myth of absolute infallibility would have perplexed them, and is merely a too-clever-by-half rhetorical cover for lazy, disingenuous people with way too much fucking time on their hands.

These goofballs will not be happy until everyone is forced to kneel in the direction of Oral Roberts University five times a day for prayer. It would never even occur to them to just leave people the hell alone to figure out their own path for themselves. That would be too easy.