Easy marks for a White House con
The Bush team mocked evangelical Christians after winning their support, book says
John Farmer
NJ Star-Ledger
"Never give a sucker an even break," W.C. Fields, the comical con man of so many old films, was famous for saying. He'd be right at home in the Bush White House.
For we now have it on fairly good authority that the Bush team, led by Karl Rove, exploited the gullibility of Christian evangelicals to further Republican political ambitions while privately scorning them as "nuts" or "ridiculous" or "boorish" or worse. They mocked and laughed at their Christian shock troops, which is shabbily cynical but understandable.
It must be hard for experienced con artists to feel anything but contempt for the suckers, or the marks as they're known on the street. Indeed, even onlookers feel little sympathy for marks, many of whom, maybe most, get scammed because they're promised something they shouldn't have in the first place.
What the evangelicals wanted from the Bushies was the power to impose a theology-driven order on government policy and the people it hires and appoints. What Rove wanted was to turn evangelical churches across the country into Republican ward clubs. It was the ultimate church-state roll in the hay.
The whistle-blower in this case is David Kuo, former deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the Bush White House who has written a new book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." As Kuo tells it in leaked excerpts from the book to be made public today, the evangelical community thought it had it made -- an alliance with the a Bush White House that held evangelicals in high regard, shared their religious fervor, and promised to pump federal money into faith-based institutions.
Actually, it was a cynical relationship from the start, as Kuo now sees it, in which Rove and Co. had contempt for the evangelicals. The Bush crowd "knew the nuts were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness," according to Kuo.
(The rest is here.)
John Farmer
NJ Star-Ledger
"Never give a sucker an even break," W.C. Fields, the comical con man of so many old films, was famous for saying. He'd be right at home in the Bush White House.
For we now have it on fairly good authority that the Bush team, led by Karl Rove, exploited the gullibility of Christian evangelicals to further Republican political ambitions while privately scorning them as "nuts" or "ridiculous" or "boorish" or worse. They mocked and laughed at their Christian shock troops, which is shabbily cynical but understandable.
It must be hard for experienced con artists to feel anything but contempt for the suckers, or the marks as they're known on the street. Indeed, even onlookers feel little sympathy for marks, many of whom, maybe most, get scammed because they're promised something they shouldn't have in the first place.
What the evangelicals wanted from the Bushies was the power to impose a theology-driven order on government policy and the people it hires and appoints. What Rove wanted was to turn evangelical churches across the country into Republican ward clubs. It was the ultimate church-state roll in the hay.
The whistle-blower in this case is David Kuo, former deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the Bush White House who has written a new book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction." As Kuo tells it in leaked excerpts from the book to be made public today, the evangelical community thought it had it made -- an alliance with the a Bush White House that held evangelicals in high regard, shared their religious fervor, and promised to pump federal money into faith-based institutions.
Actually, it was a cynical relationship from the start, as Kuo now sees it, in which Rove and Co. had contempt for the evangelicals. The Bush crowd "knew the nuts were politically invaluable, but that was the extent of their usefulness," according to Kuo.
(The rest is here.)
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