Burning Christians at the Stake

*I have been on hiatus for awhile due to my wedding. This post was composed several weeks ago because a hot topic was the scapegoating of the Social Right by the GOP establishment. Still try to enjoy it.


In the aftermath of the dismal 2008 election results, the Republicans are certainly scratching their heads trying to figure out just what went wrong. But more than just scratching their heads, the powers that be in the party are pointing fingers. And not surprisingly, none of the fingers are directed at themselves.

Yet the narrative being constructed from such establishment luminaries as David Frum, David Brooks and Kathleen Parker tell their readers that the Republican disaster of 2008 was the fault of conservatives, both from movement types but mostly the varying components of the Christian Right.

Yes, you read that correctly: the reason the Republicans are losing is because of their base, the only remaining part of the coalition is the reason the Republicans are losing. It can’t be endless wars, the revolting amount of pork spent by the “fiscally responsible party”, the shameless bailouts, the incalculable national debt, the horrific mishandling of the economy, rampant corruption within the party, bad trade policies, a reprehensible open borders immigration policy, or just plain old incompetence. You‘re right, David Frum, it’s the fault of voters who care about abortion and gay marriage.

Even some talking heads on the Left like Mort Kondracke are placing the Republican loss squarely on the shoulders of conservatives. Mr. Kondracke asserted on Fox News that conservative (rather, Republican) talk radio was the reason because talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were too polarizing and setting policy.

This is laughable itself because rather than manufacturing any of the policies that have led to Republican repudiations in 2006 and 2008, the talk radio parrots merely supported them, as they usually end up supporting whatever the party decrees anyway.

How can talk radio be destroying the party when it is one of the party’s biggest assets? While the hosts might criticize the party at certain times, they do have a near monopoly on the radio air waves, which is an avenue to bash the other party all day long. They always come back to defend the party line, and always support their dismal candidate, even when that candidate is John McCain.

What this whole episode reveals is the real animosity felt by the Republican Party toward any and all conservatives. The GOP is not concerned about any of the issues conservatives care about (even beyond the social ones). Their only goals are to win elections and increase their power, not what is best for their country.

But isn’t it ironic that these liberals-in-conservatives’ clothes (Frum, Brooks, Parker, and throw in Jonah Goldberg) habitually infuse into their writings that these social issues are “lost” while every time those issues actually make it to the ballot, the results leave the values voters victorious? If these issues still resonate with a majority of the voting public, why show such ugly contempt for them and the voters that support them?

Yet all this outrage should provoke some sort of reaction among the conservative base of the party. It was becoming clear to me, and I hope it will for millions of others, that the Republican Party only views the Christian Right and values voters with contempt. They are pawns for the establishment, nothing more and nothing less.

The Republican Party has screwed itself up, there is no doubt about that. But why are they lashing out at the only people who faithfully support the party? These are the people who still came out in droves to vote for John McCain, the scourge of conservatives, when this was the man who was supposed to attract independents and moderates?

The party and the neocons (FYI: The people who actually set the agenda) are sore that they lost yet again and need to find a way to blame someone else. These people are wailing that Sarah Palin lost the moderates and independents for them. But could it also be that maybe, just maybe, John McCain lost them himself?

It has been said before that being a neocon means never having to admit you were wrong. Fortunately for them, they found a group to blame their failures on.

The Blame Game

That more Republicans were routed was expected and sadly, Lindsey Graham was not among them. The damage could have been worse but it was done nonetheless. In the days since the historic election of our country’s first mulatto president, the GOP has been scrambling to figure out why the results were so catastrophic. They have been playing every loser’s favorite pastime: the blame game.

As I have previously conjectured, the biggest problem for the Republican presidential ticket was its nominee, John McCain. However, that is not the news that has been wafting out of what is the remainder of the McCain Camp. Not 24 hours after Mr. McCain’s concession speech did anonymous sources from the McCain campaign begin leaking to the press about how scatter-brained, unprepared, and bitchy vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin turned out to be. This after John McCain himself defended her time and again in the past two months and insisted that he really knew her well.

One of the popular reasons given for John McCain’s loss was the dismal selection of this running mate. From spring through the last weeks of summer, the McCain campaign was spinning its wheels. The freshman senator from Illinois was the toast of the liberal media. He made an even bigger splash by selecting Joe “Big Mouth” Biden, a veteran Washington bureaucrat if there ever was one. Mr. Obama was praised for acknowledging his deficiencies in foreign affairs and picked a supposed expert to help guide him. It smacked of the selection of one Richard Cheney.

So, with the media continuing to drool all over the Great Purveyor of White Guilt, John McCain, trailing in every poll, struggling with a despondent party base, had to do something bold and drastic, and did. The selection of the Alaska governor energized the reluctant conservatives who have never been comfortable with Mr. McCain. They wanted to hear the Democrats’ favorite Republican talk about abortion, gay marriage, and traditional values, Mac’s least favorite talking points. Sarah Palin became the voice to pacify those dissidents and she ended up bringing almost all of them into the Republican fold. She was the greatest gift possible for John McCain’s campaign.

But after a few dismal interviews with the elite liberal media and after her attack dog shtick got old, there were grumblings, even from Republicans, that the good lady had to go. And thus were the first signs that if the Republican ticket lost, the blame would fall on the VP.

And so it has. Never mind that John McCain’s margin of loss was probably smaller, yes smaller, than it would have been had he not selected Mrs. Palin. Had Joe “Partial-Birth” Lieberman or Tom “Terror Level” Ridge been selected, none of the conservatives would have gone with the GOP this year. While Mr. Obama ended up with a hefty electoral vote total, the electoral map was far more red than blue. A McCain-Lieberman or McCain-Ridge ticket would have resulted in a McGovern-like loss and political marginalization for the Republicans. The Religious Right, and its sympathizers like myself, are the most reliable voters the party has. Remove abortion from the platform and the Reagan Democrats will return to their otherwise natural home.

The second scapegoat of the GOP loss arises out of the first one. The charge there is that the religious and values voters of the party are preventing the party from having a bigger tent. The folks over at takimag.com jumped on David “Axis of Evil” Frum’s recent suggestion that an overhaul to the party platform is needed from “abortion to the environment.” He would have been less obvious in his Christian-bashing if he had just demanded the values voters to “get out and stay out!” What is ironic is that this suggestion comes from a chief neoconservative theorist. Mr. Frum blames the values voters for keeping the GOP a small party. But this is the same man who exiled antiwar conservatives in 2003 who dared to question the party’s decision to uproot Iraqi society. He complains the tent is too small but he’s responsible for kicking out a contingent of intellectuals who did not fit into his narrow ideology. Even if conditions appear marginally better in Iraq today than in 2006, that does not change the fact that it is still an unpopular war that most in this country do not believe should have been launched in the first place. Based on this, is the GOP a small tent party because of those stupid and ignorant Christian voters, or because the party adopted a utopian ideology: wars for democracy. Are Christians shrinking the party or was it the policies that David Frum himself promoted and then fed through the president during his tenure as President Bush’s speechwriter?

Surely a change is needed for the Republican Party. However, kowtowing to Democratic talking points is not the solution. Republicans imitated Democrats in their spending habits for the first six years of the Bush administration and were perceived as corrupt as the Democrats of the early 1990s. For it, they were almost unanimously repudiated. For all the fuss made by the moderates and neoconservatives in the party about expanding beyond the base, they are the principal reason the party is in grave danger of losing the base itself.

Have Republicans not noticed that playing like Democrats does not win elections for Republicans? The country has not moved from Center-Right to Center-Left just because democratic socialist Barack Obama thumped donkey-in-elephant’s clothes John McCain. If it was Center-Left, would the gay marriage ban have been passed in California? The country has gotten tired of the Bush years and, rightly or wrongly, John McCain was painted as more of that.

Ron Paul and his message electrified the GOP before and during the primaries in ways no other candidate did. He wanted to bring the troops home, cut the budget, eliminate superfluous departments, replace government intervention with more personal freedom, protect one’s right to life, and return to the Constitution. It was a campaign that put Americans and America first, not corporations and false ideologies. Returning to these bedrock conservative principles should be a good place for the party to start if they wish to return to political relevance.

That is, now that the Republicans have time to sit back and reflect.

A Neoconservative Carol

If someone locates my facebook profile, they will find a list of movies that includes "Airplane!" and the highly popular "Naked Gun" trilogy, all by the famous brothers Jerry and David Zucker. The classic spoofs have mocked movies and popular culture to my delight for years. This year, David Zucker, having had a political conversion of sorts, made a movie all neoconservatives and fervent war supporters are sure to love, “An American Carol.”

Responding to left-wing antiwar movies “Rendition” and “Redacted” that American soldiers were nothing more than murderers and that the whole War on Terror is nothing more than a crock, “An American Carol” sets to portray American soldiers as noble warriors volunteering out of selfless service to country and a burning obligation to defend freedom.

Kevin Farley, a lovable blob like his late brother, plays the fictitious Michael Malone, a character obviously based on socialist filmmaker Michael Moore, and a character whose only ambition is to see the United States dismantled. Kelsey Grammer breaks out of his Frasier Crane role to play the ghost of General George S. Patton. Through his airy portrayal, the audience is expected to believe that the dead Patton is even more “all-war all-the-time” than the live one. Together, the odd couple travels through history, a la “A Christmas Carol” to see how war has been used for good.

The central message of the movie seems to be that all wars are good as long as they are waged by the United States. In it, there is a sophomoric re-enactment of the infamous Munich peace conference of 1938 where that blundering idiot of a British prime minister Neville Chamberlain signed over the Sudetenland to Hitler, thus sealing the West’s fate by helping the Austrian corporal launch World War II. This comic book version of the events of 1938 is enhanced by the presence of the Japanese at the European peace conference, presupposing that like all wars, the nefarious henchmen are all united against everything that is good and free, i.e. the United States. It reminds one of President Bush’s now-infamous “Axis of Evil” speech in 2002, where he named Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as state sponsors of terror determined to threaten the United States, as if they were all united in a 3-headed monster of evil.

Back to the fake Munich: the point of this charade was to tell the audience that even talking to a potential adversary is tantamount to surrender, a classic neoconservative argument. And if you talk to that opponent, then expect them to become a genocidal maniac who will wage war on as many continents as possible.

On a note of history, the British probably could not have cared less whether ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia lived under German rule or Czech. The Munich conference was anti-climactic: war in Europe was probably already an inevitability once Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1935 with no resistance, not when the Czech Germans were signed over to Hitler. And if anyone cares, the Japanese were thousands of miles from Munich.

Just as ludicrous was the characters' trip to a southern plantation where, in a world where there had been no Civil War, slavery still existed and the South’s “peculiar institution” still thrived. Never mind the fact that slavery vanished everywhere else in the West through gradual emancipation, not through bloody wars. The audience is supposed to believe that despite all the modernization and industrialization of the North, chained humans would be still be picking cotton to this day. Here is where the neocons’ undying devotion to Lincoln shines through: the ill of slavery could only be accomplished by war and no one can question the methods Lincoln used to bring them about. Today, the neocons impress upon the country that the president has unquestionable authority to fight terrorists and that the only way to defeat a network of terrorists not tied to a country is to invade and make war on countries we don’t like.

But perhaps the most unconscionable scene of the movie was a group of soldiers about to be deployed, who were all praying. I do not contest a soldier’s right to pray, but the scene presupposes that American soldiers are on a divinely ordained mission to bring democracy to the Middle East. They may as well have opened up the Bible and said that salvation comes through the United States.

The prayer scene also smacks of emptiness because in it, the soldiers are supposedly praying for their own protection in battle. But in war, there is an unavoidable atrocity known as “collateral damage,” which is what happens when unintended targets, oftentimes civilians, get caught in the bombing of a strategic target. It is unfortunate and every war has to deal with it. What is unconscionable is the indifference many in our country have for it. Many Christians in this country think of our country’s venture into Iraq as a divine mission or that George W. Bush was ordained to become our president. War is a spiritual experience in this flick which is unsurprising since war is the chief article of the neoconservative faith. If there should be any praying done in war, my unsolicited opinion suggests it should be for its speedy conclusion, for one’s own protection, and for the protection of innocents. It rings hollow when Christians wail over the atrocity of abortion but are strangely silent when fellow innocents unjustly die in war.

Regarding all this cynicism spewing from my keyboard, someone might be wondering, why all this fuss over a movie? The Zuckers’ lampooned airplane disaster movies in the early 1980’s to the delight of many. Why is this movie any different? It is different because the issue of the movie is an always hot political topic: war. The other Zucker movies have been light-hearted and even a little political. In the second “Naked Gun” movie (“Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear) President George H. W. Bush is portrayed as a bumbling fool and all the surrounding special interest groups are only concerned with destroying the environment. Since the early 1990’s, David Zucker has had some sort of conversion to the mainstream Right where war is the only answer.

There is still some slapstick humor, but it is forced and it gets clouded over by the political tones. The other Zucker movies are completely unserious and are a distraction from the trials of reality. Therefore it made laughing at this movie a little more strained because it took the matter of war so lightly. Yes, it was still a moderately funny movie but not the side-splitting one expects from previous Zucker flicks.

In this blog, much has been written about neoconservatives, their glorification of war, and their constant need for it. There are books one could read about neoconservatives, but watching “An American Carol” is a good introduction to the propaganda of their worldview without all of the hassle of actually reading.