Venomous Villians

The Venomous Villains (also known as the "Values Voters") must be thinking that God has forsaken them. The ABC's (anything but Christian) are in dire straights without a sufficiently pure candidate for President. However, I don't think he has forsaken them, but has completely rejected them. The Christian Right has become the modern version of the money changer crowd that Jesus expelled from the Temple, because they were giving his Church a bad name.

Gail Collins of the NYTimes has written about their plight, Three-Card Morality Monte - New York Times, but it's hard to empathize:

If the Republican presidential candidates go any farther right, they’ll be opening their town meetings by biting the heads off squirrels.

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Nevertheless, the social super-conservatives are restive. Giuliani, McCain, Fred Thompson — what are all these ladies’ men doing in their primary? And while Mitt Romney has changed everything but his name in order to make them happy, a sizable chunk of the Christian right cannot seem to forgive him for being a Mormon. When Bob Jones University Chancellor Bob Jones III endorsed Romney, he couldn’t resist insulting Mitt’s faith in the process. (“As a Christian, I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism ...”)

The old guard of the religious right is terrified that if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination people will conclude that the evangelical leaders aren’t all that powerful after all or — horror of horrors — that the evangelical rank and file are not obsessed with abortion and homosexuality to the exclusion of everything else.

Their affections are up for grabs, so all the Republican candidates betook themselves to Washington this weekend to woo the Values Voter Summit. (Social conservatives, having been so successful in appropriating the word “life” are now trying to commandeer “values.”) They’d been warming up for days. . . .

Even Fred Thompson emerged from his cave long enough to make an appearance yesterday. Thompson’s tendency to look down and read his remarks provided the audience with some of the most prolonged views of the top of a bald politician’s head in recent history. When you feel compelled to use an index card for lines like, “We must have good laws. We must do our best to stop bad laws,” you have been spending too much of your life filming 30-second bits of dialogue.

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When it comes to flip-flopping, this year’s Republicans make John Kerry look like those early martyrs who had their tongues torn out rather than renounce even the most obscure tenet of their faith. Do the values voters believe Mitt won’t flip back again? Should the people who admired Rudy Giuliani’s refusal to sign the idiot no-taxes-no-matterwhat pledge just presume that he was being insincere (pretend-pander) when he promised that he would rule out a tax increase for any purpose whatsoever? Are his fans voting for the Rudy who thought the flat-tax idea was stupid, or the new one who kinda likes it?

And are they voting for the Mitt who refused to sign a no-taxes pledge, or the one who is now bragging about having signed it at every conceivable opportunity? (When this man says “change begins with us,” he means it literally.)

This is a sensitive point, you know. We’ve been burned before. There was this Republican candidate in 2000 who opposed using U.S. soldiers for nation-building and promised he’d never invade a country without an exit strategy ...

Steve Benen of TPM also has some interesting notes on the Values Voter Summit, in Thompson's fall from grace and Romney tells the faithful what they want to hear, which expands on the state of affairs confronting the right. Maybe this is just what needed to toss out the Venomous Villians from the political pulpit. See also Moyers challenges UCC: 'Drive out the money changers'.

* Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune

Tags: Politics, Religion, Commentary