Extremist Conservatives (is that redundant?) in America are realizing that Bush and Rove played them for fools. Yes, they were pandered to for their vote, and then abandoned at the altar of US Corruption: the Congress. Yes, Dr. Donson thinks he can just bark and get a bone. He's deicovering that everyone, and I mean everyone who deals with W gets screwed.
{Dr. Dobson} is not wrong. He has been punk'd -- or Da Vinci'd -- since 2004. Though President Bush endorsed the federal marriage amendment then, there's a reason he hasn't pushed it since. Not Gonna Happen, however many times it is dragged onto the Senate floor. The number of Americans who "strongly oppose" same-sex marriage keeps dropping -- from 42 percent two years ago to 28 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center -- and there will never be the votes to "write discrimination into the Constitution," as Mary Cheney puts it.
More vituperous back stabbing on the flip....
Ms. Nicolosi { Former Nun and now a screenwriter} remains a vociferous opponent of the film. On her blog she chastises Sony's heavenly P.R. helpers for coaxing "legions of well-meaning Christians into subsidizing a movie that makes their own Savior out to be a sham." But you do have to admire the studio's chutzpah, if the word may be used in this context. It rivals Tom Sawyer's bamboozling of his friends into painting that fence. The Sony scheme also echoes much of the past decade's Washington playbook. Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of "faith" are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.
Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into ostensibly "anti-gambling" letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff's Indian casino clients by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal exploitation of "faith" voters by Washington operatives, it's all too typical. This history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed. The right's leaders are already threatening to stay home this election year because all they got for their support of Republicans in the previous election year was a lousy Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Actually, they also got two Supreme Court justices, but their wish list was far longer. Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist who invented Focus on the Family, set the tone with a tantrum on Fox, whining that Republicans were "ignoring those that put them in office" and warning of "some trouble down the road" if they didn't hop-to.
Not to be out threatened, the Bushies and potential presidential candidates keep giving religious leaders press and backing. I don't know whether this is good or bad- but W is no more inclined to keep his promised to his base than he is to keep his promises to the Americans who already hate him.
But for all these betrayals, Dobson and Co. won't desert the Republicans come Election Day. If Rove steps up his usual gay-baiting late in the campaign, as is his wont, maybe the turnout of those on the hard-core right will eke out a victory for the party that double-crossed them not just on cultural issues but also on secular conservative principles (like fiscal responsibility and immigration-law enforcement). If so, they'll promptly be Da Vinci'd yet again.....
Hillary Clinton, like John McCain will soon find that Christian leaders have all the fidelity of a whore on a battleship. You can do all the photo ops in the world and still have no backing unless one has the exact flavor of ideological belief infused into their platforms.
Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking "work is a four-letter word" and for having TV's in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. "I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts," she said. (She also subsequently apologized, once her daughter complained, joining the general chorus of ridicule.) However "old-fashioned" Mrs. Clinton's thoughts, don't expect her to turn back Mr. Murdoch's campaign cash in protest against his steamy new TV channel.
This is the code. No one in power has any loyalty to anyone who can take them out of power. Not candidates, not voters, not consultants and certainly no one in the media will stand on any issue except staying in power. Why? Because the central player here- Karl Rove- will ultimately betray everyone. Even those who back him to the hilt. That's the game that's afoot. That's the game that has been played since 2000.
Like the Bush era, the cynical Rove strategy of exploiting faith-based voters may be nearing its end. For proof, just take a look at the most craven figure in American politics: the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist. To flatter the far right, this Harvard-trained surgeon misdiagnosed Terri Schiavo's vegetative state from the Senate floor, and justified abstinence-only sex education in AIDS prevention by telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he didn't know for certain that tears and sweat couldn't transmit HIV. But increasingly it's not only liberals who see through him. One of his latest stunts, a proposed $100 gas-tax rebate, provoked Rush Limbaugh to condemn him for "treating us like we're a bunch of whores.
When senators as different as Mr. Frist and Mrs. Clinton both earn bipartisan ridicule for their pandering, you have to believe that there's a god other than Karl Rove watching over American politics after all.
Parting shot: from the Bible- There are none so blind as those who will not see.