Mitt and His Magic Moment

I wanted to write something witty and clever about Mitt's so-called "Kennedy Moment." However, since I lack cleverness or wit, I'll defer to the great Charles Pierce, who crystallizes my thoughts exactly:

Hey, Mitt. They think your religion is a cult and they think you're pretty much a foof. They're always going to think that, even when and if you're the nominee and some of them beg their Personal Lord And Strength Coach for permission to vote for you. Ain't going to be pretty, son. I feel for my former governor. I truly do. He's taking an unfair rap for his religion, and an unfair rap for his gardeners, all in the same week. However -- and it is a big However -- he's the one who decided to run for the nomination of a party that has enthralled itself to shoeless fundamentalist rubes and anti-immigration yahoos. He could have gone two ways. He could have stood against this and argued, correctly, that the GOP is on its way to becoming a regional, racialist-based, minority party. (The approach John McCain briefly tried on in the aftermath of the 2000 South Carolina primary, but which he thereupon abandoned for the next seven years.) He could have done us all a favor and Souljah'ed the lunatic portions of his base. He had the money and the record to do it. Instead, he pandered, over and over again, to the crazy people, and now the crazy people are acting like crazy people act, and all the chickens are coming home to roost on his handsomely chiseled head.

Further, the endless fake parallels to John F. Kennedy's speech to the Baptist ministers are as ahistorical as they are clumsily drawn. Kennedy was addressing a still-extant cultural anti-Catholicism in the South and nativist Know-Nothingism in the North that had remained virulent within his lifetime. He was addressing his speech to the entire country and, if you read it very carefully, you discover that he essentially was telling the Baptist ministers to go to hell, that they were crackpot religious bigots whom he very subtly marginalized from a changing political process. Most of what he told them they didn't really believe, and he knew it, and they knew it. Kennedy wasn't appealing for their support. He was warning them that their stale religious prejudices were being left behind in the New Frontier. As is plain from the text to everyone except, apparently, David Brooks, Romney's speech was narrowly aimed at garnering the support of an important slice of the base he needs to win his party's nomination. The deliberate misreading of the Constitution. The Meacham-esque blathering about the religiosity of the Founders. The monumentally indiscreet -- and philosophically risible -- equation of freedom with public god-babbling. This is all nothing except more pandering. And shouldn't someone making this facile comparison point out that Romney is a Mormon bishop and is thus tied more closely to his church's power structure than Kennedy ever was? I mean, Jack wasn't even a very good Catholic. Gene McCarthy was right about that.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. That Mitt would say there should be no religious test, then would basically turn around and say that there should be a religious test and that he passes! is basically what I expected. This parallels the immigration debate, where Bush was hoping that he could bring the more socially conservative Hispanic vote to the Republican party and add to his base, forgetting that the odious Republican base doesn't like people who don't shimmer with lily whiteness, which, of course, is how the Republicans wanted it. They built their base, in large part, on racial and religious bigotry, and they still want to use it when it's convenient (like when there are Muslims afoot). Maybe this nonsense still speaks to them enough for Mitt the Duplicitous to win the primary (I doubt it, but what do I know? Little). But the coalition of pricks has been showing signs of fraying lately.

Our long national nightmare is over

Well, it's the season for Jesus Claus and Santa Christ. I am hoping to get through it without hearing too much of the yearly blather about the non-existent War on Christmas, a cousin to the shibboleth of Political Correctness that still seems to fuel the fires of conservative outrage (I suppose something has to, since things like Mike Huckabee's release of a serial rapist for political reasons and Rudy!s sex on the city raise nary a grumble on the right). Nothing ruins Christmas like Christians, of course, and over the last couple of years those of us with rational temperaments have had to endure a war on intelligence during the holiday season.

I worry no more. Bill O'Reilly has declared the war on intelligence a success. Christmas is saved from those "forces of darkness" that would allow businesses to cater to actual non-Christians during the holiday season by greeting people with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Get out of my store, you kike/raghead/atheist commie/dark person of indeterminate non-Christian religion-this is Our Time!" Or, well, whatever it was that privately-owned businesses were supposed to be forced to say to pay homage to the theocrats. Whatever. Anyway-to whom do Christians owe this overwhelming victory over the forces of almost nobody? Why, none other than-Bill O'Reilly himself! By jingo, Bill, you did it, with the strength of your hand and heart and your pure Christian spirit! Why, if it weren't for you, the overwhelmed, persecuted Christians would have had nowhere to turn, since they clearly have no power or support within our government or the media. But lucky for them, there was you, a man on a culture mission, making the world safe from licentious, amoral, sex-crazed anti-Christian liberals and their Christ-less allies. You know, when I think about it, that's probably the intersection between liberals and the terrorists. So, O'Reilly didn't really just save Christmas-he indirectly saved all of western civilizaion. That's quite a feat.

The War on the (non-existent) War on Christmas is stupid on so many levels that you could write a book about that alone and get a firmer understanding of the vapidity of the conservative Christian "movement." This, though, is a whole new level of dim. The ego of this man is stunning. The idea that America would become a Christmas-less nation (almost as though it were run by those anti-Christian heretics in Massachusetts) but for his tireless work is, well, ridiculous. For his support of this non-issue, he gives himself a public pat on the back. What I don't understand is, how can conservatives follow this nonsense? This little self-congratulatory wank inadvertently shows that his yammering about the non-existent War on Christmas was little more than cheap self-promotion. Beyond that, it has little meaning to him. You could say that about almost any subject he covers. Yet, he remains the idiot-king of the conservative talk-show world, the cubic zirconium in the Fox News tin crown. Liberals will generally eviscerate supposedly liberal pundits when they make fact-free or foolish assessments, or represent them poorly, as a quick Google search with the words "Joe Klein" will reveal. Yet, dunderheads like O'Reilly get a free pass, even though their ideology largely revolves around their wonderful selves and little else. When you're voting for a politician, you're forced to make a choice, even if it will be an imperfect one, and self-interest may be a part of the personality. That's just a part of the compromises one has to make in a democracy. But no one is forced to listen to a self-serving pudsmack like O'Reilly. That's a choice. That it's a choice conservatives make in such numbers is mightily revealing.