McCAIN AND THE RELIGIONIST RIGHT-- NOT A GREAT FIT

If you think the ">Bush Regime are the only Republican hypocrites who court low-information religionists and laugh at them behind their backs, you probably haven't met arch-hypocrite John McCain. Yesterday U.S. News & World Review published a disturbing story about what the McCain campaign really thinks about the religious right (as though we didn't already know). The story is based on two ex-aides hired to help McCain round up the religionist vote who now claim that for the campaign is just a one-way street and that there was no interest in seriously engaging religionists' and their concerns.

"In the end, you came away with the strong sense that they had contempt for the faith-based community," says Marlene Elwell, one of those fired staffers. Elwell, a prominent Christian-right activist, was hired by McCain in December 2005 to be national director of his "Americans of Faith" coalition. "The way we were being treated it was as if we had leprosy."

...The other fired staffer, Judy Haynes-- a former top Christian Coalition official hired to work under Elwell-- had an assessment similar to Elwell's, saying in a separate interview that the campaign exhibited "a contempt for Christians."

"It's an attitude about the Christian community that they don't like to have to do [outreach] but that they need to do it," Haynes said, referring to the McCain campaign's religious outreach plan. "Like, if we can get what we want without having to get too close [to religious people] and not make a big display, we'll do it."

Haynes said she was particularly disturbed by what she called the campaign's overreliance on collecting church directories as an organizing strategy. "The campaign plan to get the [religious] vote is to rape and pillage the church [membership] lists, and we didn't want to do that."

McCain, a secularist with a long history of snearing at the religionist right of his own party, has purchased the loyalty of a few GOP operatives in sheeps' clothing-- Richard Land, Gary Bauer, John Hagee, Marlys Popma... and thinks that proves he's down-- either with Jesus or, on the other extreme, the nutcase agenda.

Never mind that both Elwell and Haynes are intolerent and bigoted, hate-filled imbeciles. After all, McCain hired them for those qualities. You lay with the dogs, you get the fleas. "The reports of McCain's religious outreach effort threaten to further fray his already tenuous ties to the religious right. McCain has drawn the movement's ire with his opposition to a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, his role in passing campaign finance reform-- which Christian-right groups have alleged inhibits their ability to organize before elections-- and his branding of Christian-right leaders in his 2000 presidential campaign as 'agents of intolerance.'"


UPDATE: I WONDER WHAT GRANDPA McCAIN HAS TO SAY ABOUT RIGHT-WING "CHURCHES" INTERFERING IN POLITICS THESE DAYS. WE KNOW WHERE HE USED TO STAND

Today's Washington Post talks about the sorry state of separation of Church and State under Bush. This is a wall that hasn't just deteriorated but that has been torn down wherever no one was looking. The GOP has been using their politicized low-info churches, quite unconstitutionally, to frighten mostly the elderly into voting against their own best interests and in favor of corporatist Republicans who demolish their well being. It's hard to feel sorry for Republicans like McCain, Giuliani and Romney when these tactics they stood for are being used against them.

Florida evangelist Bill Keller says he was making a spiritual -- not political -- statement when he warned the 2.4 million subscribers to his Internet prayer ministry that "if you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!"

But the Washington-based advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State says the Internal Revenue Service should revoke the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status of Bill Keller Ministries, nonetheless.

Keller, 49, who has a call-in show on a Tampa television station and a Web site called Liveprayer.com, on May 11 sent out a "daily devotional" that called Romney "an unabashed and proud member of the Mormon cult founded by a murdering polygamist pedophile named Joseph Smith nearly 200 years ago." If the former Massachusetts governor wins the GOP nomination and the presidency, Keller's message added, it will "ultimately lead millions of souls to the eternal flames of hell."

It wasn't that long ago that the Republicans were systematically unleashing that dog on John Kerry. Today far right religionists have plans for Rudy Giuliani. Perhaps it will take this kind of jihad against Republicans by the forces they created themselves before they are willing to get serious about looking at the constitutional implications of this kind of interference in politics-- even if Keller is 100% correct about the close relationship between Satan and the Mormons.