Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Bill Moyers and the Energizer Bunny

Here, via The Conservative Philosopher, is yet another version of Bill Moyers’s slander of conservative Christians on the environment, which I discussed here, here, and here.

As he moves up the publication food chain, he deletes some of his most outrageous points. Here, now, is the essence of his contention:

I am not suggesting that fundamentalists are running the government, but they constitute a significant force in the coalition that now holds a monopoly of power in Washington under a Republican Party that for a generation has been moved steadily to the right by its more extreme variants even as it has become more and more beholden to the corporations that finance it. One is foolish to think that their bizarre ideas do not matter. I have no idea what President Bush thinks of the fundamentalists’ fantastical theology, but he would not be president without them. He suffuses his language with images and metaphors they appreciate, and they were bound to say amen when Bob Woodward reported that the President "was casting his vision, and that of the country, in the grand vision of God’s master plan."

That will mean one thing to Dick Cheney and another to Tim LaHaye, but it will confirm their fraternity in a regime whose chief characteristics are ideological disdain for evidence and theological distrust of science. Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don’t see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush’s master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration’s multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.

The corporate, political, and religious right’s hammerlock on environmental policy extends to the US Congress. Nearly half of its members before the election—231 legislators in all (more since the election)—are backed by the religious right, which includes several powerful fundamentalist leaders like LaHaye. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the most influential Christian Right advocacy groups. Not one includes the environment as one of their celebrated "moral values."

He’s reduced to saying that those who are raptly awaiting the rapture generally vote Republican, though he can offer no evidence that any Republican office-holder actually believes this sort of "end times" thinking. I have never seen such incisive political analysis!


Here, btw, is another commentary on Moyers.

Discussions - 1 Comment

My Inaugural Address at the Great White Throne Judgment of the Dead, after I have raptured out billions!

At: https://www.angelfire.com/crazy/spaceman/
Your jaw will drop!

eschatology,End Times,second coming,rapture,secret rapture,Second Resurrection,Great White Throne Judgment of the Dead,
End of days,Day of the Lord,Endtime,Judgment Day

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