Turn Left @ hypocrisy.com

In the first part of this article, I provided a basic overview of Dominionism and what it would mean for America. The Christian right has gained extensive control of the Republican party. It is now evident that no GOP candidate will be able to capture the presidency without its backing. That’s how pervasive its control has become. I also mentioned in the first part of the article that the Dominionists like to operate under the radar screen. Back in 1986, Pat Robertson - himself once a presidential candidate - distributed a memo to the Iowa Republican County Caucus entitled “How to Participate in a Political Party.” Here’s what it said:

“Rule the world for God.

“Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.

“Hide your strength.

“Don’t flaunt your Christianity.

“Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions wherever possible, God willing.”

The goal was to be in control of the government by 2004. George Bush may not have been quite as rabid an idealogue as Sarah Palin, but he was close. Bush took care of those who helped get him elected by pushing faith-based initiatives. He stifled stem cell research. He held back funding for schools unless they taught abstinence-only sex education. George Bush actively sought a Constitutional ban on gay marriage more than once. Had George Bush not blown it in so many other areas, John McCain may well have been elected, bringing Sarah Palin with him. To be sure, Barack Obama’s election has thrown a monkey wrench into their time line, but do not believe for one minute that they are giving up the ghost.

The 2008 election

Although I’ve mentioned this before, I’ll mention it again because it’s that important. Sarah Palin was not John McCain’s first choice for the vice presidency. It has now been revealed that McCain and Palin barely spoke during the campaign. McCain himself was never the Christian rights first choice as president either. It was Mike Huckabee, a Dominionist who wanted to reclaim the land for Jesus, if you will remember. When it became evident that McCain was going to be the presumptive nominee, the Christians moved to Plan B, which was to control the game via the vice presidency. McCain was told that if he chose Joseph Lieberman (aka Benedict Arnold), he would not receive their support. The Council for National Policy vetted and chose Sarah Palin for him. She did what she was expected to do: She energized the Christian base and it’s an energy that will live on in anticipation of 2012 when they believe Sarah Palin with replace Barack Obama as president of the United States.

Since Obama’s election, there have been stories about Sarah Palin becoming a rogue candidate, not adhering to the campaign’s strategy, giving unapproved interviews, and attacking Obama with the Ayers allegation without the McCain camp’s approval. That’s because Sarah Palin has her own agenda. The mainstream media has interpreted this as Sarah Palin’s own ambitiousness, and they are right to a certain point. She wants to be president in 2012 and the Christian right wants her to be president in 2012. What the mainstream media is missing is why she’s driven. She’s driven because she’s a Dominionist of the worst magnitude. This is a woman who believes that we’re in Iraq and Afghanistan because it’s God’s will. Sarah Palin, much like the Reverend John Hagee, believes that a preemptive strike on Iran (in concert with Israel) will fulfill Biblical prophesy.

Here’s what Palin had to say to Greta Van Susteren of FOX News when asked about a 2012 presidential run, “You know, I have - faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands - this is what I always do. I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door.”

In keeping with that theme, she also hasn’t ruled out a run for a Senate seat. When Larry King asked if she’d serve out her term as governor, Palin replied, “I will do what the people of Alaska want me to do.” Then she added, “if they call an audible on me, and if they say they want me in another position, I’m going to do it…My life is in God’s hands. If he’s got doors open for me, that I believe are in our state’s best interest, the nation’s best interest,I’m going to go through those doors.” Should Senator Ted Stevens retain his seat, he will almost certainly be ousted for his felony convictions. Palin could run for his seat in a special election. Or, she could challenge Republican incumbent Senator List Murkowski in 2010.

I’d like to say that Sarah Palin will be back, but the reality is that she has not gone away. Her mug is occupying every news show she can find, and you can be that this is by design. Some Republicans believe she is the future of the Republican party while others believe she will be its downfall. With the leverage the Christian right has in Republican party politics, many believe that Sarah Palin will be a big part of the GOP retooling.

As one watches Sarah Palin today, there is a marked difference. She references God and her faith much more than she did during the McCain campaign. She is no longer restricted by his campaign strategy.

Pre-Palin Dominionist politicians

Republicans have already elected Dominionist public servants, perhaps unwittingly. Sam Brownback, who ran for president for a short time in 2008, is a Dominionist, along with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo. Perhaps the most famous, however, is former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris - famous for helping George Bush win the presidency in 2000. She later went on to win a seat in the US House of Representatives.

In 2006, Harris went on a rambling, run-on explanation about how religion fits into government, “The Bible says we are to be salt and light. And salt and light means not just in the church and not just as a teacher or as a pastor or a banker or lawyer, but in government and we have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers.”

Amen, Katherine.

One thing is certain. Regardless of the fact that many of these Dominionist politicians lost their seats in the 2006 mid-term elections, it will be essential for all of us to be vigilant in order to protect the US Constitution and our way of life.

The election is just days away and pace is picking up, particularly around the Republican party. You’ve just got to wonder what side of the rainbow they’re working, though. Here’s what I’m talking about:

• In spite of being found guilty on all seven felony corruption counts, Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) has vowed to fight on in his bid to win reelection against Democrat Mark Begich. The guy should just step down. What ever happened to that slogan… you know the one…isn’t it Country First? Where have I heard that one before?

• Sarah Palin, herself recently found guilty of abuse of power, actually suggested that Ted Stevens resign. Why doesn’t she take her own advice? In fact, it seems that Sarah is in hot water again. A new ethics complaint accuses the governor of using her official position for personal gain. This time, she is accused of charging the state of Alaska $21,000 for her three daughters’ commercial flights since taking office in December 2006. Her daughters were not invited to the events and their attendance served no legitimate state business. Talk about the ultimate in hypocrisy. Between Stevens and Palin, you’d swear there was something in the water up there.

• Earlier this week John McCain finally addressed the economy. He took a few moments to warn the voting public that the Democrats would ruin the economy. Forgive me, but hasn’t eight years of Republican rule already done that? If this isn’t “ruined,” what is? While we’re at it, let’s address the McCain notion that Barack Obama’s tax plan is nothing but Socialism. Guess what? Socialism is part of the fabric of American life. We’ve always had a graduated tax plan in this country. In Obama’s plan, there’s nothing new under the sun.

• In yet another ‘hail Mary’ attempt to destroy Obama’s image, the pit bull with lipstick is now accusing the Democratic presidential candidate of having PLO ties. This time, it’s about Obama’s association with Rashid Khalidi, a leading scholar of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. Yes, he is a contemporary of Obama. He has also been an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and of our policies toward Israel. Know what? So what? I’m also critical of our policies toward Israel. This is AMERICA. We’re supposed to be able to disagree with our government without being called traitors or terrorists. This all or nothing notion about patriotism has been concocted by the Republican party. In the Constitution, it plainly states that we have a right to a redress of our grievances. It’s called FREEDOM, people. What the Republicans want is a dictatorship.

• John McCain has built his campaign around this fictional Joe the Plumber character. You know, the guy who wants to buy a plumbing business but cannot. I say fictional because the guy isn’t even a licensed plumber and he hasn’t paid his taxes. His real name is Samuel Wurzelbacher. Here’s what Joe (Samuel) has to say: ” I know just enough about foreign policy to probably be dangerous…I have no idea where John McCain’s position is…I honestly want people to go out and find their own reasons. I tell people not to listen to everyone else’s opinion. I’m not going to have them start listening to mine.” I could be wrong, but building the campaign around Joe the Plumber might be a strategic mistake on Senator McCain’s part. No?

• And finally, we’re back to Sarah Palin again. In an October 24^th speech on autism, she proved once again she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about most of the time. This time, she mocked “fruit fly research” as a big waste of money that has “little or nothing to do with the public good.” Had Palin done her homework, she’d know that the exact opposite is true. This gets back to my accusation that she’s intellectually non-curious. She really is. If she’s going to talk about a subject, she should know about the subject. Palin should have known that a recent study of Drosophila fruit flies showed that a protein called neurexin is essential for proper neurological function, making it clearly relevant for autism research. In fact, fruit flies are the foundation of much of modern genetics. They have helped us to learn about heredity, genome structure and congenital disorders. (Yes, Sarah, they’ve even helped us understand the “e” word - that’s evolution.)

Well, that about wraps it up for tonight. I’m not sure I can handle much more of this intellectual stuff anyway.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but you can’t cover up the smell. And right now the Wicked Witch of Wasilla smells pretty bad. If Senator McCain is looking at the most recent polls with open eyes, he’ll come away with the conclusion that Sarah Palin is the single biggest detriment to his presidential candidacy. Yes, that’s right. At this point in the 2008 presidential race, his association with Sarah Palin is a bigger liability than his association with President Bush, the most unpopular president in American history. While McCain spends his time blaming left-wing feminists and the liberal media for Palin’s drop in popularity, the fact is that Sarah Palin has brought this on herself because she fosters the politics of divisiveness and exclusion.

It was Sarah Palin who decided that the McCain campaign get nasty. I believe that she referred to it as “taking off the gloves.” And, of course, McCain listened and approved the strategy of moving away from the issues and into character assassination. It was immediately after that Palin began to stretch the truth about Obama’s association with the Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers. She accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” The right wingnuts in the McCain camp knocked this one out of the park, yelling out epithets like, “kill him,” “terrorist,” and “off with his head.” Even Dick Morris (remember him?) got into the act by stating that Obama’s association with Ayers is the equivalent of being friends with Osama bin Laden. Once again, the Republicans jumped on the politics of fear and invoked the “terrorist” theme. Hell, why not! George Bush has used this to successfully control the quivering American population for the past eight years. See. There it is again. Somehow I just can’t get away from drawing similarities between McCain and Bush.

While McCain has received kudos for toning this ugliness down over the past couple of weeks, let’s be frank about it. McCain only toned it down publicly when the Secret Service announced that it was interested in finding the people in the McCain audiences that were yelling these little ditties. Truth be told, McCain then quietly invested in ‘robocalls’ (automated messages) that linked Obama and Ayers. Again, here’s a similarity between McCain and Bush. President Bush used ‘robocalls’ in 2004 to sink John McCain in South Carolina. Might I suggest to the Secret Service that the people yelling in the McCain-Palin crowd were only accessories after the fact. The root of the problem, the instigator, is Sarah Palin (with John McCain’s backing).The McCain campaign has managed to tap into the lowest common denominator in American society: The ultra-patriotic, God-fearing bigot.

Palin’s divisive nature continued at an October 16 fund raiser in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she said, “We believe the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

Let’s not stop there. Palin certainly didn’t. “This is where we find the kindness and goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”

The upshot here isn’t that she’s insulting Washington, D.C. No sir. She’s insulting everybody who isn’t living in a small town. Those living in, say New York, Chicago, or San Francisco apparently are not real Americans. Secondarily, Palin is accusing those who disagree with our government of being un-patriotic. I suspect that Sarah Palin spends very little time educating herself about our forefathers and what they had in mind for our government. She prefers her history to be Palinized because it better suits her purpose. She might be interested to learn that our forefathers not only called for protecting the Constitution from threat by forces outside our government, but also from those within our own government who seek to undermine it’s basic principles. We’ve had plenty of that over the past eight years, and a McCain-Palin regime promises even more. By the way, I’d like to take the opportunity to remind Sarah Palin that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been equal opportunity killers. Americans from all walks of life (not just farmers and factory workers) and from everywhere across our nation (not just small towns) have been killed. However, they have not died protecting the virtues of American freedom as she suggests. They’ve died protecting our access to Middle Eastern oil in order to feed our all-consuming addiction.

Speaking of assaulting the Constitution, the Wicked Witch of Wazilla has broken with McCain and emphatically stated her support for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I’d call singling out one group for oppression to be divisive. Wouldn’t you? And wouldn’t you call a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage writing discrimination into the Constitution? This very act undermines the basic principles behind the Constitution. If an amendment is added, it should strengthen the Constitution, not weaken it. The objection to same-sex marriage is clearly based on religious ideology. For example, we now know that the Mormon church is the driving force behind California’s Amendment 8. There is no place for religious ideology in the formation of national policy. That is why there is a separation between church and state. The issue of same-sex marriage is a question of basic civil rights. It is not a topic to be voted upon by Congress, and it does not belong on any ballot in any state.

So, here we are with November 4^th fast approaching. I learned today that the GOP has spent more than $150,000 on make-up, clothing and accessories for Sarah Palin and her family since she was selected as McCain’s running mate. She spent $13,200 on make-up alone during the month of September (so much for being just an average hockey mom). It’s all about image, but image only goes so far. While it may be possible to physically transform Sarah Palin’s appearance into something more vice presidential, it’s almost impossible to hide the dark side of her divisive and un-Christian character. That has been laid bare for all to clearly see.

Sarah Palin declared during her debate with Joe Biden that she was going to take her message directly to the American people. I’ve decided to do the same tonight. I’m not writing about John McCain in the third person. I’m taking my case directly to the Senator himself after watching the third and final debate.

Senator McCain, I’m here to tell you why you do not deserve to lead this nation. You are simply not worthy of the task. Now, of course, the Republican pundits have you winning the third and final debate. Unfortunately, the American people didn’t quite see it that way, and they are all that matters in the final analysis. While you were indeed more aggressive than Barack Obama last night, the fact is that you have no plans. All you do is keep repeating over and over that you are going to bring about change in Washington. What change? Where are your plans? Let’s hear some specifics. You seem to have picked up some of your running mate’s bad habits. Instead of answering the moderator’s questions, you talked around them. It’s a case of Creeping Palinitis. There is no cure for this short of transporting Sarah Palin back to Alaska and obscurity.

Now, let’s address this “Joe the Plumber” guy. It’s all a lie, Senator McCain. You invented him so that you could use him to make your point during the debate. I can never figure out how people like you think you won’t be found out. Today I decided to find out more about Joe the Plumber. I found that he is a registered Republican who just happens to think that Barack Obama is a Socialist. He is also the brother of Charles Keating’s son-in-law. He owes the government back taxes, and he doesn’t even have a plumber’s license. It’s pretty apparent that you are a fraud, Senator McCain. There’s no way to spin it.

There’s also that matter of how low your campaign has gone. Now, you said that there have been some attendees at Senator Obama’s rallys that have worn offensive T-shirts. Let’s talk about your crowd. They yell things like, “kill him,” “terrorist,” or “off with his head” when referring to Senator Obama. Your crowds, Senator McCain, call for blood. Your campaign is out of control, yet you lied during the debate and said you repudiated every attack on Barack Obama. You have not. In fact, you have participated. Today, the day after the debate, your campaign released a ‘robocall’ linking Obama to William Ayers, even after vowing to return to a respectful campaign. At least two of your supporters have spent a considerable amount of time linking Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden, even going to the extreme in suggesting that the campaign should waterboard Senator Obama. And a California group has released a racist, tasteless cartoon of Barack Obama on the face of a food stamp (as opposed to actual currency). Pictured with Obama is some watermelon, a carafe of Kool Aid, some barbecued ribs and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Of course, the perpetrator insists she meant nothing racist by it. I believe she said, “It’s just food to me.” Right. Senator McCain, you are the commander of the ship. Therefore, you are fully responsible for spreading the fear that has dredged up the worst in our society. These people take their cue from nobody but you and your running mate.

Senator McCain, the lowlife campaign you have run in desperation for a win is quite convincing. It’s clear that you are not the right choice to lead this nation back to greatness.

*For those of you who do not know about the Keating Five, It’s unlikely that Senator McCain will fill you in. Please click here for details!

Now that Sarah Palin has been found guilty of abuse of power, I’m thinking she’s got no business questioning anybody else’s character. While I’m not denying that she acted within her rights as Governor of Alaska in firing Walt Monegan, the fact is that his failure to fire her sister’s ex-husband, a state trooper, was a contributing factor in the decision. While it’s true that Palin has difficulty forming sentences and understanding the issues that face Americans, one thing that she has down cold is how to get others to do her bidding. So that Palin could stay above the fray, she had her “first dude” and her advisors make more than two dozen phone calls to Monegan regarding her former brother-in-law.

As for the accusation that supporters of Barack Obama had anything to do with this investigation, let’s look at the facts. This inquiry was begun well before Senator McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. She was already accused of abuse of power before he selected her and he was aware of this. McCain chose her anyway. Of course, after the selection was made, Palin reneged on her promise to cooperate with the investigation and the Republican party even tried to have the investigation delayed until after the election. Know what? Politicians accused of wrongdoing do not deserve “cover” until an election is over. The American people have the right to information that may or may not affect their voting decision. I’d also like to remind Palin’s supporters that there were 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats on the legislative committee, hardly an overwhelmingly Democratic group.

If I were advising the McCain campaign, I’d tell them to get back to the issues and try to figure out how they are going to distance themselves from the policies of George W. Bush. The American people want to know what McCain-Palin will do to improve their lives and their situation. The American people want to hear about how this ticket will handle the economic meltdown. The fact is that McCain’s top advisors believe that if McCain focuses on the economy, he will lose. If that’s the case, at least he will lose with dignity. Right now, there’s no dignity left in this unholy alliance called McCain-Palin.

When Palin’s audiences start shouting for Obama’s blood, there’s something very, very wrong happening in America. Her rhetoric preys on the fears and ignorance of her audience. Palin now spends her days weaving half-truths and lies, dividing the country and stirring up racism and bigotry. I suggest that the authorities forget looking for those yelling hate-filled epithets (like kill him or terrorist) and look to the inspirational source, Sarah Palin and John McCain. They are the true root of the problem. Their current campaign focus is not just disgraceful, it’s sick. If it is not now abundantly clear that neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin are fit to govern the American people, it’s hard to imagine what it will take. How much lower can they go?