Schmoes

I have a friend who, via his wife, is a complete Opus Dei. I keep asking him when they are going to look in the mirror and start to feel like the biggest chumps in the world.

The GOP isn't going to ban gay marriage, nor are they going to outlaw abortion. They desperately want to keep those issues alive as a way to induce the chumps to, every single fucking election, show up, donate, and vote. It's due for an acronym: SUDV.

Today's LAT previews a book that has needed to be written for some time now: Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction by by David Kuo, the former No. 2 official in the faith-based initiatives program.

The book focuses on one of the Bush junta's earliest, and most deadly, coups: faith-based initiatives. FBIs basically took tax dollars from people like me and gave them to xian fundie ministers -- something that would have made, for example, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson roll over in their graves. Oh, sure, the money supposedly wasn't to fund churches, it was to fund faith-based "programs." Except, as any fool knows, cash is fungible. So if the govt. steps in and starts "funding" the church's food pantry, well, then, all of a sudden, there's that much more money available to buy the minister a new Cadillac or to fix the plumbing in the parsonage. And, gee, big surprise, the fundie xians (what, you don't really think that the Wiccans have been cashing in on this giveaway, do you?) have been providing the Republicans with dollars, votes, and "moral" cover, ever since.

Do I expect the Opus Dei and other fundie xian whack-jobs to wake up any time soon? Hell, no. These rubes have been the natural feeding ground for every type of snake oil salesman, pederast, and con job since Jebuz chased the apparently comparatively honest money changers out of the temple, thereby creating the one thing that nature abhors above all else - a vacuum.