Jonathan Chait has an opinion piece in today's LAT noting that the fundies are setting themselves up to get punked again. You'd think that six straight years of Republican control of, well, everything that yielded neither a ban on gay marriage nor the criminalization of abortion would have given the fundies a clue that the corporatists are, as Chait says: deeply hostile to social conservatism, and its leaders manage to fool the base over and over again. For "fool" I'd substitute the words "use like a bunch of chumpy, chump, chumps," but, either way, you'd think the fundies would figure it out.
Chait looks at the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls and concludes that: one odd thing jumps out at me: Most of them have expressed deep hostility to the religious right's point of view in the past, and several of them are now insisting that they didn't mean a word of it. I guess it's a good indication of just how twisted a religion the fundies practice that the people courting their votes would rather admit that they're liars than admit that they aren't passionately-devoted sniffers of everyone else's panties. An excellent example of the vote-for-me-I'm-an-outright-liar-not-a-rational-adult-when-it-comes-to-other-people's-sex-lives is Mitt Romney. As Chait reports: Bay Windows, a Boston newspaper covering gay and lesbian issues, published an interview it had conducted with Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 1994. Romney, now a leading candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, had characterized the religious right as "extremists," said he essentially had the same position on gay rights as Ted Kennedy and cast himself as an heir to his moderate father, George Romney, the Michigan governor who walked out of the 1964 Republican convention to protest Barry Goldwater.
Those positions certainly seem believable. Mitt Romney had run as a supporter of abortion rights and legislation protecting gays from on-the-job discrimination.
But he has since reversed both positions, and an advisor insisted that Romney had been "faking it" as a pro-choicer, explaining that he had to do it because social conservatism is unacceptable to the voters of Massachusetts.
That's right. Romney has no problem saying that he lied to the voters of Massachusetts and espoused positions that were actually 180 degrees away from what he really believed just so that he could get elected. I'm not a xian, but I know there's something in that book of theirs about not telling lies. Chait suggests that the fundies might want to consider that if Romney would lie to someone else just to get power, maybe he's lying to them now, but the fundies don't want to hear it. Indeed, social conservatives don't even want to hear about Romney's scandalously tolerant past. Brian Camenker, a right-wing activist who has been sounding the alarm bells about Romney, has gotten a frosty reception from his fellow religious conservatives. " 'Why are you attacking Romney?' " they keep asking him, according to my colleague Ryan Lizza. "He's better than Giuliani and McCain.' " By better, they apparently mean: currently more willing to mouth the anti-sex, anti-woman platitudes that are music to our fundie ears.
Chait suggests that John McCain is also a liar who'll apparently twist himself into a pretzel in order to gain power. Sen. John McCain of Arizona once described religious-right leaders as "forces of evil" and has mused that he would not support the repeal of Roe vs. Wade. More recently, McCain, like Romney, has backed off his moderate statements (not surprising, given the furor they provoked). But McCain is even less credible in his newfound conservatism; only a total naif could believe him now. A general rule of political life is that when a candidate says something unpopular off the cuff and then takes it back in prepared remarks, you can be sure that the original statement is what he really thinks.
So the fundies, who should be more concerned over their own financial plight, over the future of the planet, over sickness and suffering the world over, will continue to vote for the candidate most likely to punk them. Again.
When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
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