(Sorry for how short this diary is!)
This is big!
Todd Tiahrt is running for Senate in Kansas and he's considered the front runner in the GOP primary.
I wonder if it helps or hurts honestly...
H/T to the Rachel Maddow show and Jeff Sharlet for their outstanding journalism! Here's the video:
Wow. These crazies are dangerous. Pol pot, Hitler, and Osama Bin Laden?
That's not what I want in the Senate!
More...
Don't get me wrong. I don't have any problem with deeply religious people coming from a family full of them but this seems anti-Christian to me. I can't imagine meeting anyone who believes they should emulate Hitler to gain power!
I think this story is being ignored by the media -- short of Rachel Maddow. We need to spread this around and make the media cover it. Here's what Mr. Sharlet wrote in this book about Tiahrt:
The day I worked at C Street I ran into Doug Coe, who was tutoring Todd Tiahrt, a Republican congressman from Kansas. A friendly, plainspoken man with a bright, lazy smile, Coe has worked for the Family since 1959, soon after he graduated from college, and has led it since 1969.
Tiahrt was a short shot glass of a man, two parts flawless hair and one part teeth. He wanted to know the best way “for the Christian to win the race with the Muslim.” The Muslim, he said, has too many babies, while Americans kill too many of theirs.
Doug agreed this could be a problem. But he was more concerned that the focus on labels like “Christian” might get in the way of the congressman's prayers. Religion distracts people from Jesus, Doug said, and allows them to isolate Christ's will from their work in the world.
“People separate it out,” he warned Tiahrt. “'Oh, okay, I got religion, that's private.' As if Jesus doesn't know anything about building highways, or Social Security. We gotta take Jesus out of the religious wrapping.”
“All right, how do we do that?” Tiahrt asked.
“A covenant,” Doug answered. The congressman half-smiled, as if caught between confessing his ignorance and pretending he knew what Doug was talking about. “Like the Mafia,” Doug clarified. “Look at the strength of their bonds.” He made a fist and held it before Tiahrt's face. Tiahrt nodded, squinting. “See, for them it's honor,” Doug said. “For us, it's Jesus.”
Coe listed other men who had changed the world through the strength of the covenants they had forged with their “brothers”: “Look at Hitler,” he said. “Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Bin Laden.” The Family, of course, possessed a weapon those leaders lacked: the “total Jesus” of a brotherhood in Christ.
“That's what you get with a covenant,” said Coe. “Jesus plus nothing.”
Kind of makes his comments about the President seem...reserved. (He asked on the floor of the House whether Obama's mother would have an abortion...stay classy Tiahrt!)