Hermann Goering once said, "Of course the people don't want war, but if you keep telling them that they're being attacked and that if they don't agree with what the government is doing they will be classified as un-patriotic, they'll follow along." To me, that is the single most cynical definition of a fascist.
Can anybody not see the relevance the above introduction has to the operating philosophy of the Bush administration? The Bush family is crawling with psychologically damaged rich kids who wanted to either please a parent or crawl out from under their parents' shadow to be perceived as being successful in their own right. You put that situation together with creatures like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and you have a neo-Nazi kind of organization. The parallels are scarier than the real thing of the 1930s except for one more thing: The exploitation of religion to enhance a political agenda.
To his credit, George H.W. Bush did not wear his faith on his sleeve, nor did he display the kind of hypocrisy his eldest son has exhibited. His son's "conversion" to being born again is suspect in its sincerity being that Laura threatened to dump him if he didn't stop his partying ways. The guy who converted him is one of the more cynical evangelical types in Texas who covets political favor. The late Molly Ivins does a nice job of pointing this foible out in her book, "Bushwhacked". Like John McCain, the son and grandson of well-decorated Admirals, W. needs to be somehow successful on his own. "Poppy" Bush, being the doting father of his first born, did everything he could to help this ne'er-do-well get elected governor in Texas (a mostly ceremonial position) and President of the United States.
He gave his son Lee Atwater and Karl Rove to create a new kind of fascism centered around this child of the elite whose only scruples, it seems, are associated with getting elected and consolidating power. In 2000 I told my Republican friends that making George W. Bush President of the most powerful nation on Earth was like giving the keys of a Ferrari to a 10-year old; sooner or later, he'd wrap it around a tree. Sadly, he did it sooner rather than later.
The point of this diary, though, is not to review the obviousness of Bush's failures, but to look at one of the major devices used to get him in office in the first place: the evangelical churches. If there was ever a man-made creation that used the most frail of frailties of mankind to create a crypto-political organization, I am not familiar with it. The pathetic leaders of these churches lusted after power and control by using fear and guilt as the cornerstones to scaring people into believing what those leaders wanted them to believe. This "movement" began with southern Baptists, then spread to other splinter churches to the point now where we see arena sized "churches" openly pandering to political positions without any fear of tax laws being enforced against that obvious merger of church-state activity.
The Bushites recognized this mind-control entity to the point of turning them into a bloc of votes that got them within a whisker of the White House. It took an election fraud in Florida and a right-leaning Supreme Court to finish the job, but they got those things. Add to that voter apathy of disgusting proportions and the nose of the right-wing extremist camel got under the tent flap of reason, Democracy and true faith and real values. Sadly, there was nobody in the tent, so it walked in and took over. A bloodless coup, you might say. Since then, the Bushites have been quietly subverting the law to their own means with little things like using taxpayer money to fund faith-based projects. Is anybody paying attention? Politicians have been so afraid to say anything disparaging against organized religion of any stripe, that the creep of this neo-fascism has gained significant ground in shaping our domestic and foreign policies. Yes, I used the word fascism. I did, because there is a significant economic machine supporting a religious or quasi-religious agenda.
I read something just after the 2004 election that put W. back to "work". The subject was gay marriage. Someone quoted overhearing Bush say, "I don't give a shit about gay marriage!" That spoke volumes about his "conversion" as well as his exploitation of the faith of others in order to get elected. Rove and Atwater had done their jobs.
The trash heap that has been American politics over the last 4 years is only now being cleaned up. What is cleaning it up is disgust with what we've become as a nation and a people. Faith, as represented by evangelical churches, has lost a lot of its luster thanks to the blatant racism, jingoism and absolutism that they portray. Of course, not all churches are guilty of this, but the ones garnering all the ink are getting it more often - and, boy do they need to get taken to the woodshed for trying to un-weave the fabric of the civil rights movement for their own pathological desire to control thought. The electorate is finally waking up. Barack Obama has lit a fire I haven't seen since the Kennedy years. People, especially young people, are getting off their lazy asses and participating in the Democratic process.
In 2004, 30% of U.S. citizens eligible to vote weren't even registered. Now we're seeing record-breaking voter registration nation wide in spite of the Republican's attempts to suppress it. They know the time for this kind of neo-fascist politics is ending with a thump. The stragglers will still make headlines for a while, because the press needs a story. But, it looks like the worm is turning back in favor of reason and intelligent use of our process to elect those who best represent the nation's needs.
I am so sick of seeing radical, hypocritical religion around the world causing "tribes" to continue to fight each other over something for which there is not a shred of evidence. FAITH becomes the battle cry of the ignorant and the lazy alike. Why? In my humble opinion it is because we as a species have not yet evolved socially far enough from the tribal survival mode that is inherent to our drive to live. Our tribes are bigger than they were 50,000 years ago, so the controlling mechanism must be bigger. The sad irony is that, if left to its own devices, religion, wrapped in the cloak of righteousness will be our undoing as a species: we will have killed ourselves off over something we invented accidentally and didn't have enough humility to admit that we were mistaken.