[Peace-discuss] Fwd: The Evangelical Rebellion by Chris Hedges

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I often find myself agreeing with Alex Cockburn.  Here I think he's 
good on Huckabee and the presidential campaign.  The comparison with 
Bryan is apt, except that Bryan was more anti-war than Huckabee: Bryan 
resigned as Secretary of State when a mendacious Democrat president 
(celebrated by liberals) manipulated the US into war.  Regarding this 
thread, I think Cockburn is right to say, "The clamor about Huckabee's 
Christian beliefs is overdone, not least among the left whose bigotry on 
matters of religion is particularly unappetizing" -- although, needless 
to say, neither Cockburn nor I agree with Huckabee's theology (if on 
different grounds). --CGE]

	Mike Huckabee's Ascending Chariot
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Suddenly it's Huckabee. The surge of the former Arkansas governor in the 
race for the Republican nomination has the pell-mell excitement of one 
of Napoleon's victorious rampages across Europe in his heyday. In this 
case the long faces belong not to the crowned heads of the Grand 
Alliance, but to the Republican establishment, quivering with terror at 
the thought of their doughty standard bearer in 2008 being a former 
Baptist minister, a fellow who thinks God created the world 6000 years 
ago more or less in its current form.

The great dread of American political establishments down the decades 
has been that a wild man will suddenly sneak past all obstructions 
cunningly devised to repel uncomfortable surprises and upset the apple 
cart. Democrats even today shiver at the memory of William Jennings 
Bryan, another implacable foe of Charles Darwin, who ran on a silver 
platform in the late nineteenth century. George Wallace, a redneck 
governor out of Alabama, ran as an independent presidential candidate in 
1968 and Richard Nixon was terrified that he would steal enough votes to 
throw the race to the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey. A would-be assassin's 
bullet put paid to that threat.

The clamor about Huckabee's Christian beliefs is overdone, not least 
among the left whose bigotry on matters of religion is particularly 
unappetizing. A robust majority of all Americans, so polls unfailingly 
show, maintain they have had personal encounters with Jesus Christ. 
Ronald Reagan believed and publicly stated more than once that the 
Apocalypse was scheduled to occur in his lifetime at Megiddo, as 
excitingly trailered in the Good Book. The soigné Governor Mitt Romney, 
now displaced by Huckabee as the front runner, is a Mormon and thus, 
unless he is a heretic from the Latter Day Saints on this specific 
issue, believes that Christ was Lucifer's older brother, as Huckabee has 
not been slow in pointing out.

But Huckabee should not be dismissed as simply the creature of the 
Christian fundamentalists who play a very significant role in the 
Republican primaries and who are currently hoisting him in the polls. Of 
course they like Huckabee for all the obvious reasons, and because the 
alternatives are the Mormon Romney or Giuliani, who's hopped from wife 
to wife, shared an apartment with a male gay couple and favors abortion.

But on many substantive matters, demonstrated during his ten years as 
the governor of Arkansas, Huckabee was often a progressive, with 
enlightened views and a record of substantive executive action on 
immigration, public health, education of poor kids and the possibility 
of redemption for convicted criminals. In his ten years as governor, 
Huckabee commuted the sentences of, or outright pardoned, over 1,200 
felons including a dozen murderers. This was a courageous and 
unparalleled display of enlightenment in a country whose interest in 
rehabilitation is near zero. As Huckabee said in answer to Mitt "throw 
away the key" Romney, should a woman convicted of check-kiting when she 
was 17, have this criminal offense prevent her from getting a job thirty 
years later?

Democrats started by chortling over Huckabee's meteoric rise in the 
national polls. The Democratic National Committee supposedly ordered a 
moratorium to onslaughts on the Arkansas governor in the hopes that as 
the nominee he will be roadkill for them in the race next fall. This 
patronizing posture is already fraying. Huckabee would not be a 
pushover. He's quick on his feet, has an easy sense of humor and has a 
powerful appeal to Americans unconvinced by any of the major contenders.

Thus far, beyond hee-haws at his Christian fundamentalism, the most the 
liberals can come up with is that he intervened to save his son from 
very nasty charges of dog-abuse at a Boy Scout camp and that among those 
whose sentences he commuted was a rapist, Wayne Dumond, who killed at 
least one woman after his release. Murray Waas has devoted thousands of 
plodding words to the case.

It's chilling to watch liberals and pwogs thundering their outrage at 
the mere idea of pardons or commutations, as though one of the besetting 
horrors of America today isn't the penological mindset that puts people 
behind bars for decades, or the living death of what the criminal 
justice industry laconically terms LWOP, Life Without the Possibility of 
Parole. Let's go back to 1988, when Democratic candidate Michael 
Dukakis, who had supervised an elightened parole and day-release program 
as governor of Massachusetts, was trashed for letting Willie Horton out 
of prison on a weekend pass. Who first raised the Horton issue. No, not 
George Bush Sr. Not Lee Atwater. It was Al Gore, in the '88 Democratic 
primaries.

Of course, if you decide not to let people rot in prison for forty 
years, and let some of them out, there's a chance there'll be a Dumond 
or a Horton among those released. That's a risk. To say that it's an 
unacceptable risk is the same as saying there's a risk in administering 
the death penalty, because an innocent person might get gassed or killed 
with poison, but that nonetheless the price is worth it. Some guy with a 
DUI on his record gets his license back, gets loaded again and kills 
another carload of innocents. So, we should bring in a lifetime ban of 
all DUIs from driving ever again? More people get killed by drivers with 
DUIs on their record than by convicted killers let out of prison, or for 
that matter by sex offenders. These days, with liberal assent, sex 
offenders serve their full terms and still can't get out of prison. Run 
a society totally on principles of revenge, not forgiveness or 
redemption and you end up in the realm of Milton's Moloch, "besmeared 
with blood of human sacrifice and parents' tears."

Then there are the corruption charges. Huckabee accepted gift vouchers 
for meals at Taco Bell and had a registry at Target and Dillard's where 
he and his wife got big-ticket items like a Jack LaLanne juicer. Hold 
the front page! From reading the furious brayings of Matt Taibbi in 
Rolling Stone, you'd think Huckabee was the Emperor Bokassa, of the 
Central African Republic, crowned on a golden throne, wearing a Roman 
toga embroidered with a hundred thousand pearls, then driving off in a 
coach pulled by six white horses flown from Paris.

Try as they may, dustrakers like Taibbi have a hard time showing 
Huckabee was anything more than a piker in the perks department.

Here's some of the record of shame. Total for items requested on the 
Target wedding registry, $ 2,282, including a 12-piece cookware set for 
$ 249, a DeLonghi retro 4-slice toaster for $ 39. 99 , napkins, kitchen 
towels, two king-sized pillows and a clock. Total on the Dillard's 
registry, $4,635, not omittting the Jack Lalanne juicer for $ 100.

True, the Huckabees got married in 1974, but they had that covenant 
marriage in 2005, which is certainly as convincing as Hillary Clinton 
saying she just got lucky when, as Arkansas' first lady she made $99,000 
on cattle futures off an initial stake of $1,000, the whole miraculous 
bonanza organized by a guy in the retinue of Don Tyson, the largest food 
processor in the state of Arkansas. More convincing, actually.

As so often with American politicians accused of graft and corruption, 
one reels back in embarrassment at the tiny sums involved. In 2003 
Huckabee was fined $250 by the State Ethics Commission of bringing shame 
on Arkansas by accepting a $500 canoe from Coca-Cola in 2001. The 
Comission also gave him a rap on the knuckles for not reporting 
acceptance of a $200 stadium blanket the same year. He probably wanted 
it to put over his knees in the canoe.

Huckabee appealed the sanctions to Pulaski County Circuit Court. Judge 
Fox said he should have owned up to the blanket, but threw out the $ 250 
fine, finding that there wasn't sufficient evidence to show that the 
canoe, painted with the words "Coke, Arkansas and You," illegally 
rewarded Huckabee for doing his job as governor. Huckabee battled other 
such charges, including more substantial gifts of clothes and furniture. 
It was all familiar stuff, to connoisseurs of small-time corruption 
charges. Were the suits for the shrunken Huckabee to deploy to Arkansas' 
advantage at conferences of governors or trade trips abroad? Was the 
furniture for the rehabbed governor's mansion while Mr and Mors Huckabee 
roosted in the double-wide?

Arkansas underpays its governors as a matter of policy, forcing them 
into a flexible ethical posture, as opposed to chill high mindedness. 
Incorruptibles are often more of a menace to society. The American way, 
which isn't so bad, is to have the laws on the books, for proper use if 
things start getting seriously out of control. Corruption, held within 
bounds, is a useful lubricant. Is it really worse for Muscovites to slip 
the traffic cop 500 roubles ($20), thus paying a de facto fine, as 
opposed to getting a ticket, and mailing in your $250 speeding fine to 
the County Superior Court?

Bill Clinton got $20,000 a year for governing Arkansas. Huckabee got 
$80,000.

These guys had to go to McDonalds or Taco Bell. It's all they could 
afford. Of course they pocketed $10,000 bribes in cash for issuing end 
use certificates and the like. If the truth be told, Gov Clinton in his 
Arkansas days in the governor's mansion, was a piker in corruption, just 
like Huckabee. The laughable thing about Whitewater was the pathetically 
small sums the Clintons stood to make if all went well, which they did 
not. When the tribunal investigating Irish prime minister Charles 
Haughey finally concluded its labors, long after his death, I totted up 
the proven bribes and it came to something like $50 million.

So Huckabee will probably survive these charges, as he should the whines 
of New York Times columnists that he is unversed in foreign affairs. 
Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush demonstrated conclusively that a 
passing glance at a stamp album is the only education required for 
dealing with the rest of the world.

Huckabee's single rival as a genuinely interesting candidate is another 
Republican, Ron Paul, who set a record a few days ago, by raising $6 
million in a single day. Unlike Huckabee, Paul's core issues are 
opposition to the war and to George Bush's abuse of civil liberties 
inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. His appeal, far more than Huckabee, 
is to the redneck rebel strain in American political life ­ the populist 
beast that the US two-party system is designed to suppress. On Monday 
night Paul was asked on Fox News about Huckabee's Christmas ad, which 
shows the governor backed by a shining cross. Actually it's the mullions 
of the window behind him, but the illusion is perfect. Paul said the ad 
reminded him of Sinclair Lewis's line, that "when fascism comes to this 
country it will be wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross." In the 
unlikely event they had read Lewis, no other candidate would dare quote 
that line.


Robert Dunn wrote:
> so.... what is the point. The Republican establishment hates him because 
> he will not cowtow to them. He is more of a threat than Ron Paul or 
> Ralph Nader ever was or would be. I disagree that a Huckabee presidency 
> would bring about a new wave of fascism. This is one of my hugest pet 
> peeves of the liberal wing of the American Left. The hostility to 
> evangelicals needs to cease for the Left to be effective. It would have 
> sounded absurd if during the 2002 15th Congressional District, Carls 
> opponents attacked him based on his devout Catholic beliefs. Who would 
> not rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter if the main threat 
> from Carl was that through him, then Pope John Paul II would control 
> policy for East Central Illinois. Of course it would be nice to have my 
> state taxes go down from 30% to the tithe of 10%.
> So, if others can really help me out with some fruitful discussion, 
> perhaps Carls 2 or more cents, on this issue. I am curious as to who the 
> "real enemy" is? Is it the "Right-Wing populists led by the noses?" Or 
> is it the corporate establishment? Either way, if the Liberal wing of 
> the American Left, particularly the Democratic activists who claim to 
> speak for the Left continue to come up with ridiculous notions of a 
> Christian theocracy as the real threat, the more evangelicals will 
> reject the Left and continue "to vote against their economic interests." 
> So with all fairness to actual folks concerned about real violations of 
> civil liberties such as the Patriot Act, domestic wiretapping, etc. Baby 
> Jesus at city hall or some public school kid praying over his PBJ is not 
> a threat to average Americans.
> Carl, do you have any insight into this ridiculous article?
> Who am I supposed to fear, the corporate elite or the rubes duped by 
> them. Because I could just as well say that there are liberal rubes that 
> the corporate elites are duping. This whole culture war issue where 
> abortion, environmentalism, gay marriage, even identity politics on the 
> Left is in my opinion another way of the corporate elite to maintain 
> power. Are those who just say whatever the Democratic Party spouts at 
> the moment dupes as well, as I have seen some even on this list?
>  
> Cheers,
> Robert
> 
> 
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:21:40 -0800
>     From: jencart13 at yahoo.com
>     To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>     Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: The Evangelical Rebellion by Chris Hedges
> 
> 
>         A friend forwarded this, so I will, too.
> 
>         The Evangelical Rebellion
> 
>         http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071223_the_evangelical_rebellion/
> 
>         Posted on Dec 23, 2007
> 
>         By Chris Hedges
> 
>         The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents
>         a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the
>         radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in
>         later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here
>         to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in American
>         politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed
>         the yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now
>         confronted with the fact that they themselves are the ones who
>         have been taken for a ride. Members of the Christian right,
>         recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote
>         against their own interests around the issues of abortion and
>         family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into
>         new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with
>         looming economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could
>         demolish what is left of American democracy and set the stage
>         for a Christian fascism.
> 
>         The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country
>         created fertile ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is
>         sounding the alarm bells. It is scrambling to bolster Mitt
>         Romney, who, like Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, will
>         continue to slash and burn on behalf of corporate profits.
>         Columnist George Will called Huckabee’s populism “a
>         comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.” He
>         wrote that Huckabee’s candidacy “broadly repudiates core
>         Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential
>         legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market
>         system allocating wealth and opportunity.” National Review’s
>         Rich Lowry wrote that “like [Howard] Dean, his nomination
>         would represent an act of suicide by his party.”
> 
>         Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the “Today” show.
>         “There’s a sense in which all these years the evangelicals
>         have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party,” he
>         said. “They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one
>         of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, now they’re
>         serious.’ They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and
>         vote, they actually would want to be a part of the discussion.”
> 
>         George Bush is a happy stooge of his corporate handlers. He
>         blithely enriches the oligarchy, defends a war that is the worst
>         foreign policy blunder in American history and callously denies
>         medical benefits to children. Huckabee is different. He has
>         tapped into the rage and fury of the working class, dispossessed
>         and abandoned by the mainstream Democrats and Republicans. And
>         he refuses to make the ideology of the Christian right, with its
>         dark contempt for democratic traditions and intolerance of
>         nonbelievers, a handmaiden of the corporate establishment. This
>         makes him a much more lethal and radical political force. 
> 
>         The Christian right is the most potent and dangerous mass
>         movement in American history. It has been controlled and led,
>         until now, by those who submit to the demands of the corporate
>         state. But the grass roots are tired of being taken for rubes.
>         They are tired of candidates, like Bush or Bill Clinton, who
>         roll out the same clichés about working men and women every
>         four years and then spend their terms enriching their corporate
>         backers. The majority of American citizens have spent the last
>         two decades watching their government services and benefits
>         vanish. They have seen their jobs go overseas and are watching
>         as their communities crumble and their houses are foreclosed. It
>         is their kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The old guard in
>         the Christian right, the Pat Robertsons, who used their pulpits
>         to deliver the votes of naive followers to the corporatists, is
>         a spent force. Huckabee’s Christian populism represents the
>         maturation of the movement. It signals the rise of a truly
>         radical, even revolutionary force in American politics, of which
>         Huckabee may be one of the tamer and less frightening examples.
> 
>         Hints of Huckabee’s bizarre worldview seep out now and then.
>         Bob Vander Plaats, Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, for
>         example, when asked about his candidate’s lack of foreign
>         policy experience, told MSNBC: “Well, I think Gov. Huckabee
>         has a lot of resources that he goes to on national security
>         matters. Here’s a guy, a former pastor, who understands a
>         theological nature of this war as we’re fighting a radical
>         religion in Islam.”
> 
>         Robert Novak noted that Huckabee held a fundraiser last week at
>         the Houston home of Dr. Steven Hotze. As Novak wrote, Hotze is
>         “a leader in the highly conservative Christian
>         Reconstruction movement.”
> 
>         Huckabee has close ties with the Christian Reconstructionist or
>         Dominionist branch of the Christian right. The Dominionist
>         movement, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the
>         Christian faith and American patriotism, is small in numbers but
>         influential. It departs from traditional evangelicalism. It
>         seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and
>         concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to
>         take political power. It shares many prominent features with
>         classical fascist movements, at least as such movements are
>         defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as
>         “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive
>         preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood
>         and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in
>         which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,
>         working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional
>         elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with
>         redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
>         goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
> 
>         Dominionism, born out of Christian Reconstructionism, seeks to
>         politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief
>         in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for
>         moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case
>         American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an
>         ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which
>         contradict each other. Paxton argues that the best way to
>         understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in
>         all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what
>         they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the
>         ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and
>         implicit in fascist public language” and “many of them
>         belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm
>         of reasoned propositions.”
> 
>         Dominionism teaches that American Christians have been mandated
>         by God to make America a Christian state. A decades-long refusal
>         by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all
>         following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for
>         Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over
>         the Earth itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on
>         Christians to actively build the kingdom of God on Earth.
>         America becomes, in this militant Biblicism, an agent of God,
>         and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s
>         Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan.
>         Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and
>         fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the
>         basis of our legal system, in which creationism and
>         “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system,
>         and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one
>         and all. Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will
>         be abolished. Women will be removed from the work force to stay
>         at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be
>         denied citizenship. 
> 
>         Baptist minister Rick Scarborough, founder of Vision America and
>         a self-described “Christocrat,” who attended the Texas
>         fundraiser, has endorsed Huckabee. Scarborough, along with
>         holding other bizarre stances, opposes the HPV (human
>         papillomavirus) vaccine on grounds that it interferes with
>         God’s punishment of sexual license. And Huckabee, who once
>         advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public and
>         opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure,
>         comes out of this frightening mold. He justified his call to
>         quarantine those with AIDS because they could “pose a
>         dangerous public health risk.”
> 
>         "If the federal government is truly serious about doing
>         something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would
>         isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote. “It is
>         difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is
>         the first time in the history of civilization in which the
>         carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the
>         general population, and in which this deadly disease for which
>         there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue
>         instead of the true health crisis it represents.”
> 
>         Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position, but
>         he remains deeply hostile to gays. He has used wit and humor to
>         deflect reporters from his radical views about marriage,
>         abortion, damnation, biblical law, creationism and the holy war
>         he believes we are fighting with Islam. But his stances
>         represent a huge step, should they ever become policy, toward a
>         theocratic state and the death of our open society. In the end,
>         however, I do not blame Huckabee or the tens of millions of
>         hapless Christians—40 percent of the Republican
>         electorate—who hear his words and rejoice. I blame the
>         corporate state, those who thought they could disempower and
>         abuse the working class, rape the country, build a rapacious
>         oligarchy and never pay a political price. 
> 
>         Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity
>         School, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian
>         Right and the War on America.”
>         =
> 
>         ________________________________________________________________________
>         More new features than ever. Check out the new AIM(R) Mail ! -
>         http://webmail.aim.com
> 
> 
>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.
>     Try it now.
>     <http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51733/*http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Don't get caught with egg on your face. Play Chicktionary! Check it out! 
> <http://club.live.com/chicktionary.aspx?icid=chick_wlhmtextlink1_dec>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss