No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Puking for Jesus

I could make a joke about talking to Jesus on the porcelain telephone, but instead I will point you to this interesting article by Matt Taibbi about a revival meeting at the megachurch of John McCain's beloved spiritual advisor and endorser, John Hagee. (HT Jim at UTI) It's a freak show of fundy insanity that is both fascinating and repulsive. Taibbi's conclusion is very depressing:

By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this - once you've gone this far - you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.

I'm sick of the double standards in the right-wing corporate media. For every word in the news about John Hagee, there's been a tidal wave of coverage of Jeremiah Wright. CNN and Faux News are practically playing the "God damn America" clip in a closed loop 24-7. And I haven't heard a single word in the corporate media about Rod Parsley's claim that the US was founded with the mission to destroy Islam by military force. Let's get the masses riled up over the scary black guy! (And his church has already had bomb threats as a result.)

Personally I find Hagee and his ilk infinitely scarier than a hundred Jeremiah Wrights, because of the vast wealth and huge hordes of mindless followers they command, and the influence they wield in the highest corridors of power.