Republican Gomorrah

Max Blumenthal's expose of how much the fundamentalists control today's Republican Party is one of the best reads on domestic politics in a long time. There are so many great moments. One summarizes ,in my opinion, why educated professionals are fleeing the Republican Party in droves. Sarah Palin is a member of a Third Wave Pentecoastal Church, which preaches that Satan had sex with Eve and gave birth to Cain--the so-called "Serpent's Seed". And through Cain, in the words of the Church's founder, came "all the smart, educated people to the antediluvian flood--the intellectuals. They know all the creeds but they do not know God." So, it doesn't matter to Palin's supporters she is clueless in terms of policy, she has right religion.

Blumenthal also does an excellent job of explaining the on-going appeal of George W. Bush to the religious right. Despite all the failings, he is seen as carrying out the personal commands of God, as he emphasized many times in conversations with foreign leaders. Horribly,if these people control the party, then it can not get beyond George W. and reinvent itself. Logically, it must plunge deeper into the religious right.

After finishing the book, it's apparent that there are only two possible nominees for 2012--Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. Blumenthal does a splendid job of laying out Huckabee's long-time relationship with people like Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family and by inference it's clear that Huckabee can talk the talk in a way that I think will be more compelling than Palin. One priceless scene is how Palin calls Dobson and tries to persuade him McCain is on board against Stem-Cell Research (he wasn't) and how he was firmly for banning gay marriages (he wasn't.) Since Dobson muscled McCain to choose Palin, it didn't really matter he had his girl.

Blumenthal does a real service by exploring the hinky side of the Christian Right's heroes. We discover that Diaper Dave Vitters, not only visited the D.C. Madam but also regularly engaged in S&M with a prostitute in New Orleans. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council came to Vitters defense because funds for the faith-based initiatives were coming to the Lousiana based branch of his outfit courtesy of Vitters. In addition, Vitters might be replaced by a Democrat. But in the case of Idaho's Larry Craig, who could only be replaced by a Republican, he could be thrown under the bus to assert the righteous indignation over gay sex.

Some of the best writing is on the Republican gay underground and how it sees itself as "Jews in Hitler's Army" by backing the extreme right's social agenda. Blumenthal reminds us of the long-history of gay-baiting by the right started under Joe McCarthy and enabled by Roy Cohn, who died of AIDS but never admitted he was gay. In the 1980s, when I first came to Washington during the Reagan years, it was startling to see how many gays were Republican activists, while the Democrats were basically homophobes then.

One interesting portrait is that of Howard Ahmanson, Jr, a terribly shy man who suffers from Tourette's Syndrome and who was once hosptalized for mental illness, who put his fortune at work funding anti-gay, anti-abortion, pro-big business candidates for the California Assembly and by 1994 secured a Republican takeover of that body. He provided a good bulk of the funding behind the anti-gay Propositions in the State. He invested early on in the career of Marvin Olasky, who was a member of the Communist Party in the early 1970s when that group barely existed and who later converted from Judaism to an ultraconservative version of the Presbyterian Church. Olasky later became the godfather of compassionate conservatism, arguing that the church had been the traditional and most effective approach to philanthropy before the New Deal. During the bruising primaries between George W. Bush and John McCain, Olasky accused McCain's Jewish neoconservative supporters as worshipping the "religion of Zeus". His brainchild was Bush's creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.

Ahmanson's other success was the creation of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which touts the intelligent design movement and seeks to debunk evolution. Americans United for Separation of Church and State calls Discovery "the most effective and politically savvy group pushing a religious agenda in America's public school science classes." The institute was founded by former Reagan official Bruce Chapman, a conservative Catholic. He has recruited dozens of research fellows, directors and advisors who all boast advance degrees from respectable universities.

There are some surprises in the book. One is the war the religious right waged against Newt Gingrich, culminating in a power play by Tom DeLay to force Gingrich to resign both as speaker of the House and finally his seat in Congress. While I knew Newt's womanizing galled some Republicans, I never realized it was the religious right who actually waged the campaign against him.

Another fun section of the book concerns Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff, who hustled the religious right into blocking attempts to loosen restrictions on gambling if these state efforts conflicted with their Indian clients ,who ran casinos and gambling operations on their own territory. This sparked a brawl between them and Haley Barbour, who represented the Jena Choctaws, who were about to be granted a gambling license, and were rivals of Reed and Abramoff's clients. Reed managed to persuade Focus on the Family and Dr. Dobson to flood the White House and the Department of Interior with protests. In the end, Haley triumphed but not before the evangelicals unleashed a torrent of warning about the sins created and fostered by gambling.

The book is extremely troubling for its insights into how far the Republican Party has gone down the path of religious extremism. Much of the fiery rhetoric we hear today against Obama is present through much of the religious right's war against.. fill in the blank. And what is especially disturbing is the evangelicals stated position that it is alright to lie in order to advance their agenda. This is the doctrine of Islamists, who believe it is righteous to lie and deceive the infidels.

Throughout much of the book, there is a stream of thought that America must adopt biblical laws and that somehow America has become degenerate and corrupt. It depends on the age when they discuss this--first it's during the civil rights period, then it's against the Age of Aquarius and the new religions, now it's against gays and anti-abortion. From the early 1980s, there is also a doctrine that legitimizes armed struggle, particularly the violence against any place or person perceived as performing abortions. This language was the creation of Francis Schaeffer, whose son within the last year has denounced the very religious right he helped create.

Imagine for a minute any of these people charged with running the largest economy in the world, a government which controls 30% of that economy, and the largest military on earth. That is a truly frightening prospect. But then again, we did--the Bush Administration was not only the most conservative in terms of policies in the modern age but the one most dominated by the religious right. And where did it get us--a Global Depression, two wars, a suspension of our constitutional rights and the legal rationalization of torture.

There is one thing in this book, an incidental detail but significant for understanding today's political rhetoric. Republicans actually polled on language suggesting fear and death and found that these ideas brought forth the most coherence among their followers. Death Panels, Death Book,and Obama letting terrorists free on the streets,another terrorist attack. Among Republican voters this is red meat. Personally, I doubt whether this resonates anymore in the public at large.