Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

We will not go back.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Open Thread: United GOP Church of Christianists, Hypocritical

Open Thread: United GOP Church of Christianists, Hypocritical

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The Christianist’s God must love hypocrites, He made so many of them…

When President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky made national headlines, CNN reported that then-Family Research Council President Gary Bauer was considering a television ad campaign demanding that Clinton explain his relationship with her.

But the group seems to have a very different reaction when it’s a president the conservative organization supports…

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins recently told Politico that evangelicals were willing to give Trump a “do-over.”

“We kind of gave him — ‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’ ” Perkins said in an interview for the latest episode of Politico’s Off Message podcast…

The great Mr. Charles P. Pierce for the rebuttal:

… It’s the 20th anniversary of the Great Penis Hunt of 1998. This happens to be when modern American political journalism went into a very bad tailspin out of which it has not yet recovered…

Without Whitewater, there is no Lewinsky scandal and without awful journalism, there is no Whitewater. Without Whitewater, there is no endless drumbeat of faux scandals—TravelGate! FileGate! Vince Foster! Billing records! Cattle futures!—fed to eager young reporters by professional Republican ratfckers, pool-hall liars in Arkansas, conservative congressional aides and, ultimately, from sources within the investigation run by Kenneth Starr who, subsequent events at Baylor University have proven, is one of the most ludicrous charlatans ever to stumble into public life. And Whitewater was a pile of horse hockey, and it always was…

Without the journalistic malpractice of the era of the Great Penis Hunt, there wouldn’t have been the journalistic malpractice that bedeviled the 2000 presidential campaign of Al Gore. (Billing records = Invention of the Internet). And, without the journalistic malpractice of the era of the Great Penis Hunt, there wouldn’t have been the journalistic malpractice that erupted with stunning power in the 2016 presidential election. I hate to break it to this panel of the greats of my profession, but what elected Donald Trump was less about what he learned from Bill Clinton about lying, and more about what the ratfcking community learned about how easily elite political journalism can get played, especially on the subject of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some things never die.

Coda:

Reader Interactions

150Comments

  2. 2.

    jl

    I’ve heard Trump gets a lot of mulligans in golf (granted on his own authority, IIRC). So, I guess Trump can sow his wild oats as much as he wants while he’s still young, with no consequences from the Xtianists.

  5. 5.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    @Alain the site fixer:

    Whoah, what happened? I was going about my life and suddenly something went bzzzzztttt! and I ended up here.

    Did you tweak something on the site?

    Iin fact, where is this? Looks familiar.

  6. 6.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud: TRMS just said there are protests outside Schumer’s house. I wonder if Marco Rubio, Dean Heller, Martha McSally and Ted Cruz are seeing the same.

  9. 9.

    Magda in Black

    These people are not Christians. They wouldn’t know Jesus if he walked up to them on the street. He wouldn’t be blonde and blue eyed. I despise these people. Not a fanof organized religion, I’m sorry to say Too many years of studying theology did that to me.

  12. 12.

    Bill E Pilgrim

    Just came to post this: Stimela

    One of my favorite all time records. RIP

    There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi
    there is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe,
    There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique,
    From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Swaziland,
    From all the hinterland of Southern and Central Africa.

  13. 13.

    NotMax

    You get a do-over here

    Green light for sloppy seconds?

    (Or in Dolt 45’s case, sloppy seventy-seconds.)

  14. 14.

    Mike in NC

    Frederick Douglass Stormy Daniels has done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more…

  15. 15.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    speaking of anniversaries,

    “Casablanca” debuted nationally, 75 years ago today

  17. 17.

    Corner Stone

    I think this may be a bellweather for the downfall of the “Christian Right”. Personally, I do not give a tinker’s damn what someone does in their personal sex life, but am waiting with baited breath to see if there’s any blowback on this kind of hypocrisy.

  18. 18.

    MJS

    Evangelicals are, quite frankly, and I guess ironically, the scum of the earth. They care not one bit about others, other than hurting them. They care only about power, or proximity to it. They would not vote for a Democrat if their life depended on it, so their support of Trump is neither surprising nor any loss.

  21. 21.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Corner Stone: one thing that’s been missing from this round of this story is that millennial Xians are disgusted with their elders, which I believe we were hearing as recently as the “Two Corinthians” spectacle.

  22. 22.

    Frank McCormick

    Oh come on! Not a link to diapers as well? I think that there’s still a couple of dots to be mapped.

  25. 25.

    hellslittlestangel

    A do-over on what? Cheating on his wife with a sex worker? Covering it up? Paying the sex worker off? What? What?

  29. 29.

    Jeffro

    You know kind of off topic but I still cannot believe that Trumpov fired the fucking director of the FBI for refusing to halt an investigation into T’s own collaboration with a hostile foreign power’s attack on our democracy … and nothing happened

    Just like I cannot believe that Jared Kushner tried to set up a secret communications channel directly to the Kremlin and still has his White House security clearance instead of a small cell in the FBI buildings basement

  30. 30.

    Mnemosyne

    @hellslittlestangel:

    I swear to dog that my one Trump-voting cousin posted a Facebook link during the election to one of the preachers explaining that Hillary was a liar and that’s a fault that no one can overcome, but Trump was just foolish and misled and was totally going to come to Jesus.

    Yes, that’s right: in their propaganda, it’s Hillary who lies all the time, not Trump.

  34. 34.

    Boatboy_srq

    @Patricia Kayden: Didn’t that particular acronym come up in a thread just prior to this?

    Perhaps eemom can find some rabid Lefties who made Ms. Vitter’s appointment happen just by wishing it.

  35. 35.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Jeffro: Nothing is happening now but that may change if Mueller provides overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing and criminal activities by Trump and his cohorts.

    I’m optimistic that Trump can be brought down. Flipping Congress will go a long way in moving in that direction.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    @NotMax:

    I did not realize this.

    Pueblo, still held by North Korea today, officially remains a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy.[3] Since early 2013, the ship has been moored along the Potong River in Pyongyang, and used there as a museum ship at the Pyongyang Victorious War Museum.[4] Pueblo is the only ship of the U.S. Navy still on the commissioned roster currently being held captive.[5]

    I hope Trump doesn’t use this as a pretect to attack North Korea.

  38. 38.

    Steve in the ATL

    Has anyone else done the crossword puzzle in the Delta inflight magazine this month? Both Paul Ryan and the Drudge Report make appearances. WTF?

    Uh, crossword puzzle spoiler alert.

  40. 40.

    Boatboy_srq

    @Jeffro: Four decades of insider scheming have made the GOTea into a haven of grifters and fraudsters, whose only salvation seems to be that their Dem opponents are not perfect and thus can be despatched by BSDI-wielding pseudojournalists and by voters too embedded in Fauxnews unreality to grasp that they’ve all been had.

  42. 42.

    scav

    @hellslittlestangel: A do-over on covering-up cheating on that specific wife with that specific sex-worker for that specific election. (Basically, he could do it all again so long as he used a different credit card.)

  44. 44.

    joel hanes

    Shamelessly boosting my own comment from end of the third or fourth thread down, because it connects a bit to the Pierce quote.

    Florida’s Jim Crow era felon disenfranchisement law blocks 1.5 million people from voting

    I’m always late to the thread, but I want to point out that this was the very law that enabled former FL Secretary of State Kathleen Harris to “cage” tens of thousands of eligible voters in the year 2000 Presidential election, and prevent them from casting a ballot. (The eligible voters’ names were deemed “similar enough” to the names of felons to be stricken from the rolls, and they had names like Clay and Washington and Rodrigues that were considered to make them likely Dem voters.) That made the FL vote close enough that the Rs could send the issue to a partisan SCOTUS, who selected W to be President despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote.

    In short: without this law, Al Gore would have been clearly elected President in 2000,
    and the world would be a much better place today.

    If there’s any way that the rest of us can support the campaign to overturn this law, we should jump on it with everything we’ve got.

  46. 46.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    I don’t know why people are so hard on Vitter, after all he said God had forgiven him.

    Geez, isn’t that good enough.

  48. 48.

    joel hanes

    @Bill E Pilgrim:

    where is this?

    It’s the planet Tralfamadore, Billy.
    You were unstuck in time for a while again, but now you’re here, and Montana Wildhack is waiting.

  54. 54.

    Jeffro

    Btw with Mueller wanting to interview Trumpov directly, ABOUT the Flynn and Comey firings…and today’s McCabe stories…

    …I think we are getting pretty close to a breaking point here. One side or the other will have to make a big, bold move before much longer.

  58. 58.

    raven

    @realbtl: Oh that must have been spectacular! There is a woman I knew in the movie. She hitchhiked there from Champaign-Urbana and she’s cleaning off seats for here admission!

  63. 63.

    Boatboy_srq

    @Patricia Kayden: IOKIYAR wasn’t coined to normalize GOTea privilege and lawbreaking. It was coined to describe the normalization that had already occurred. It’s a condemnation of a political system and a journalistic sphere that accept it. It speaks to the hope of a more just political systme with more honest players because the alternative is the guillotine. It is a call to action for us all. IT IS NOT A SHRUGGING ACCEPTANCE OF THE STATUS QUO, and none of us should have time for any who think it is.

  64. 64.

    Tenar Arha

    I may have missed this news/discussion earlier today, but Ursula K. LeGuin passed away. Can we get a round up for her tonight/tomorrow?

    ETA FTFNYT link

  67. 67.

    trollhattan

    @Jeffro:
    I’ve misidentified at least a dozen breaking points so I’m outta da bidnez. It’s a bit like saying, “Welp, fvcking Patriots aren’t digging themselves out of this hole.”

  71. 71.

    randy khan

    @Tenar Arha:

    Reposting what I wrote on Facebook earlier tonight:

    It’s hard to explain how important her writing is to me. The first thing of hers that I read was a collection of short stories that included her most famous work – The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – and an astonishing story told from the point of view of a large tree. Then there was the Earthsea Trilogy, and, most important to me, The Dispossessed (plus so much more).

    They’re wildly diverse works, even the ones that are set in the same universe – The Left Hand of Darkness posits a world populated by beings who usually are non-gendered, but become male and female to breed, while The Dispossessed is a fully-developed anarchist society – and they explored important issues in human life with sensitivity and nuance.

    That said, she also was entirely capable of being pretty funny. You have to be pretty funny to write the dog in Schrodinger’s Cat. (If you’ve never read it, here’s a link: The Cat’s Meow.)

    And there are so many great characters. Shevek is brilliant, sophisticated about some things and utterly naive about others, someone who understands how to navigate a society with no official rules and discovers that he doesn’t know what to do in a society that supposedly is governed by rules, utterly human. Ged is forced to confront the consequences of his own failings and find a way fix them. Odo, who led a revolution, but died before she could see its results. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

    I am glad I lived in a world that had her. Now that she’s gone, I find myself thinking of her as a character in the last paragraph of Omelas:

    Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

  75. 75.

    dr. bloor

    Love watching Maddow form the circular firing squad on Schumer on my teevee right now.

    She’s upset because “Republicans think they won this.” Really. No acknowledgement of minority status, know acknowledgement of CHIP x 6 years.

  76. 76.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @dr. bloor: I think this is the most aggressive I’ve ever seen her, and she’s not making much sense. Schumer seems really frustrated, and pissed off.

  83. 83.

    Corner Stone

    @dr. bloor: There’s a fucking demonstration marching outside of his house. Maddow hit every button naysayers might bring up and Chuck put his thinking on the table, then asked for help from everyone who cares about this issue.

  84. 84.

    Steve in the ATL

    @NotMax: On the Paul Ryan one, “Paul” was the answer. There have to be a thousand non-offensive ways to get that word. I would have gone with “he was the walrus”. It was on the top line, though, so it was intentional. Fuckers. If I didn’t get all these upgrades i would fly a different airline! Which is hard to do out of Atlanta.

  91. 91.

    tobie

    @Corner Stone: @dr. bloor: It’s pretty easy to rile me up but this is one fight within the Democratic / progressive faction that doesn’t bother me so much. If Schumer’s strategy proves effective, people will forget their chest-beating and hair-rending, “They caved, they caved.” If the caucus holds together during the next shutdown fight, people will be saying, “Go get ’em and don’t cave.” All this is to say that I don’t think the intraparty fighting right now will make much of a difference in three weeks.

  95. 95.

    Chyron HR

    @dr. bloor:

    She’s upset because “Republicans think they won this.”

    Uh, yeah, the nazis won the whole shebang on November 8, 2016. The inevitable ethnic cleansing of the country is a real fucking shame, but her emails.

  96. 96.

    Fair Economist

    @tobie: The hazard is that the hostility will goad Schumer into an extended shutdown next time, because extended shutdowns always lose for the precipitating party, all the way back to Gingrich 22 years ago.

  98. 98.

    cthulhu

    The evangelical/conservative Christian response to Trump, I think, really distinguishes a large sub-group of people whose religion is entirely self-serving. By this I mean, they use their religion to excuse their own behavior while judging everyone else. This includes excusing others as they see fit. Maybe it is knowing or unknowing, but this is what they are using their religion to do. They feel little need to change their opinions or behavior in any real way so their affiliation really is in name only despite the depth of devoutness they may claim. And I imagine they feel very empowered in acting this way.

    The tenets of basically every religion argues against doing this and there are plenty of very religious people who are aghast at Trump but as with coverage of the WWC we often don’t hear from these people.

  101. 101.

    Chris

    @randy khan:

    As it happens, I only just got back around to Ursula Le Guin. I’d had to read Wizard of Earthsea at school, and just a couple months ago I finally read The Dispossessed. Good writer. Sad she’s gone.

  102. 102.

    tobie

    @Fair Economist: True enough. I would feel more comfortable if the drumbeat started now for McConnell to bring a clean DACA bill to the floor. Schumer could say, “We gave, now it’s your turn.” One curious thing is that support for DACA has risen since Trump’s election.

  104. 104.

    Uncle Omar

    Here’s the deal, all you have to do is say the eight magic words. Once you do that all is forgiven forever, both past and future. No further worries on any score. It Don’s case, if F. Graham or anyone else said them for him it applies. No need for mulligans. The eight magic words? “I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior.” I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the near future we see t-shirts with “8 WORDS” across the front and all the Evangelicals would know exactly what it meant and the rest of us would be scratching our heads and asking “WTF is that shit?”

  107. 107.

    Chris

    @cthulhu:

    In this particular case, I would say the tenets of their religion actually argue for this. The fundiegelical brand of Christianity is huge on “faith not acts” doctrine, that all of us are failed and sinful beings, and the only thing that matters is whether or not we’ve accepted Jesus in which case he’ll ignore our sins. (Hence the bumper stickers, “not perfect, just forgiven.”)

    In other words: the only thing that matters is whether you’re in their club or not. “Good” and “bad” are words that define team identities, not actions.

  108. 108.

    Mnemosyne

    @tobie:

    There’s a link in (I think) the previous thread with a long excerpt from a liberal columnist (maybe Pierce?) pointing out that the “Democrats caved!” narrative is so ingrained that there’s a big chunk of people on the left who didn’t bother to look at what Schumer actually agreed to and just assumed that he must have caved, because that’s what the MSM told them he did.

    That’s really the danger, IMO — we are training a vocal group of activists to never take “yes” for an answer.

  109. 109.

    Suzanne

    @Corner Stone:

    but am waiting with baited breath to see if there’s any blowback on this kind of hypocrisy

    You’ll be waiting forever. They are hypocrites and they are shameless.

  111. 111.

    JR

    Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.

    In the name of God, go!

  112. 112.

    Mnemosyne

    @Chris:

    I will give the defense of John Calvin that OO is usually here to give: under the original idea of predestination/faith not works, the idea was that there is no way to know ahead of time whether or not you’ve been saved, so you need to believe and follow the tenets of Christianity no matter what.

    Of course, humans being human, people immediately started looking for the cheat code that would let them shortcut their way to heaven even though that was the whole reason Luther split off from the corrupt RCC in the first place.

  114. 114.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Mnemosyne: I had to turn off the ObamaBros podcast this week after about a half hour of raging and whinging. You’d think three guys who lived through the public option and gun safety fights would have some idea of what 80% support can translate to in actual electoral politics

  115. 115.

    Mary G

    @Mnemosyne: I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually learn that a lot of this “Chuck Schumer is a traitor” bilge is driven by Russian bots. Anger is their friend.

  116. 116.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Mnemosyne:

    That’s really the danger, IMO — we are training a vocal group of activists to never take “yes” for an answer.

    Believe it or not, some of the unions I deal with are like this. They fight us when we try to send new jobs into their bargaining unit—things like that. I don’t understand it at all. And I am a very stable genius.

  118. 118.

    tobie

    @Mnemosyne: I’ll be curious to see how things look after the midterms. If there is a blue tsunami–please, FSM, let this be the case–I think a lot of the infighting will end. If not, it will be brutal. Even here, the antipathy toward the party is sometimes surprising. Doug! put up a contribution thread for the DCCC last week and I think besides Another Scott and myself no one wanted to defend the group, which, warts and all, is still really important.

  120. 120.

    lamh36

    Random tweet that made me chuckle a bit, cause, what makes this tweet funny/interesting…it could be talking about either Gary Oldman OR Johnny Depp..

    @ira
    If you have an abusive past in Hollywood, just star in a Harry Potter franchise movie because your stans will swarm anyone who tries to bring that past up and bonus you’ll keep getting cast in movies

    6:35 PM – Jan 23, 2018
    https://twitter.com/ira/status/955962173594808320

  121. 121.

    Adria McDowell

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve stopped listening to their Pod Save America podcast all together. Too much doom and gloom. The only consistent guest on that I really like is DeRay.

    I do still enjoy Pod Save the World, although I think Intelligence Matters is better.

  122. 122.

    lamh36

    Got a mid week off day tomorrow…so I don’t have to go to bed at a certain time tonight…so I’m gonna do some more trip prep for the rest of the night until I eye can’t stay open anymore…then off to catch up on sleep I’ve missed in the past 6 days of work, and since deciding on this last minute trip.

    My tentative plans…all day sightseeing on Saturday and depending on how tired I am from that…maybe an good night’s sleep, then a couple of touristy things in the morning on Sunday (tentatively, Warner Bros Studio tour and MAYBE one day car rental so I can check out Santa Monica beach at my own leisure) and free time in the afternoon leading into the evening Sunday.

    On Monday, tentative plans depends on whether or not I get those Will & Grace tickets for the 4pm taping. If I get the tickets, well then it’s ALL about getting to the check in site early enough to hopefully be seated as part of the audience. If I miss out on the W&G taping, then I basically have a free day. I have tickets to The Real, so I’ll def go to that if no W&G and then my afternoon and evening will be free…and I WILL be outside the spot where the Black Panther premiere is on Monday, so I can glimpse some stars maybe!!!

    Gonna probably be mostly early nights each night of the trip, when I travel alone, I try not to do too much “late night” stuff…better safe than sorry I say.

  123. 123.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Mary G: Yay!! More great news.

    As to those protesting Schumer, they need to keep in mind that Republicans in the House are probably not going to pass DACA. Democrats should fight like hell for it but I’m not expecting any miracles. I’m not even sure if Trump would sign a DACA law if Dems took over Congress and passed it.

  125. 125.

    B.B.A.

    I figure Democrats won’t get blamed for the ill effects of a government shutdown, because we’re the party of big government and civil servants (many of whom are Those People) and shutdowns hurt us more than they hurt Republicans.

    On the other side you’ve got Rand Paul and Mike Lee who are supporting a shutdown because they sincerely want to abolish the federal government so why bother funding it in the meantime? So support for shutting down the government is bipartisan and serious, unlike those shrill partisan Republicans who want to shove a budget down America’s throats without a single Democratic vote. See what I did there, Mitch?

  127. 127.

    Mnemosyne

    @lamh36:

    Will you be staying in Burbank or nearby? We could probably round up me, Ruckus, BillinGlendale, Roger Moore, and assorted other jackals for a meetup on Sunday. If so, email Anne Laurie so she can put it on the front page. There’s a good hangout called Story Tavern that’s in downtown Burbank.

  130. 130.

    RobertDSC-Mac Mini

    @Uncle Omar:

    Having recently gone through this with the help of my pastor, I have to say something about this.

    When I stood up and “said the 8 words” I lost a lot of grief and guilt and shame for things I had done before I had heard the Word. But in “saying the 8 words”, I felt myself change, and I felt new. With this new feeling came a sense that things I did before don’t work now. So I have changed a lot of my behavior as a result of “saying the 8 words”.

    I certainly don’t believe that anything I do after standing up is forgiven. It is part of my understanding that by standing up, I made a change in my life. I don’t feel as though I have carte blanche to do/return to doing the things that gave me grief, guilt and shame.

  131. 131.

    Marcopolo

    @tobie: Even I am not optimistic enough to believe the infighting will end if the Dems take back the House. More likely there will infighting over whether to/when to impeach among other things. Always remember the Democratic Party is a coalition party made up of a very diverse group of folks. Both a strength and a weakness.

  132. 132.

    Corner Stone

    @Steve in the ATL:

    They fight us when we try to send new jobs into their bargaining unit—things like that. I don’t understand it at all.

    You don’t? I find that odd considering your motivation.

  133. 133.

    lamh36

    @Mnemosyne: the hotel I’m staying at is near the Hollywood/Western Metro station.

    It had good reviews on Trip Advisor and Google Reviews and the price was great for 4 nights and free parking.

    As I said, I’m looking to do mostly PT, and I’d like to see as much as I can on Saturday, I’ll likely take a guided tour and then pick 3 or 4 of the sites I really want to visit more extensively on Sunday, which will def include Santa Monica Pier area, if not the Park.

    Once I get it more solidly together, I’ll def be sending along the info to Anne Laurie..

    Alright..If I don’t post again in the next hour…see ya’ll on the flip side and every have a great rest of the night.

  134. 134.

    Duane

    @joel hanes: Many states allow felons to vote once they complete the terms of their sentence. Unfortunately, they’ve been led to believe they lost their voting rights. Feature, not bug l’m sure.
    A concerted effort to inform ex- felons of their right to vote might turn some states blue.

  135. 135.

    Marcopolo

    @Patricia Kayden: Yep. That’s the trickiest part of the needle to thread. Far as I can see the only way to get Ryan to hold a vote is to poison pill a spending bill on the one side or offer something so juicy Trump squees like a baby & tells Ryan he has to have on the other. Probability of either approach working is slim to none.

  137. 137.

    J R in WV

    @Magda in Black:

    I agree completely. These people believe in the absolute truth found in a magic book, thousands of years old, that they have never sat down and read from start to finish. Instead they are told what to believe about the contents of the magic book by others who have also never sat down to read the book from start to finish. And those people have a monetary income to defend.

    Having read the book from cover to cover several times, I hesitate to recommend it as a guide to life. At all.

  138. 138.

    Boatboy_srq

    @Patricia Kayden: Great heavens no.

    I’m just bent that certain OTHER people here seem to equate a statement that for once in libprog history fits on a bumper sticker with somehow throwing up all our hands and giving in to the status quo.

    I’m shouting WITH you. Because you get it, and because we agree. But I’m still mad enough to shout, and I’m still mad enough to organize, and vote, and act. And because the alternative to finding ways to express that is to exterminate the rich, and that’s not a solution no matter how momentarily satisfying it might be.

  139. 139.

    Citizen Alan

    @RobertDSC-Mac Mini:

    If you don’t mind me asking, how old were you when you made your profession of faith. One of the things I find off-putting about evangelical Christianity is that it largely seems to be a tribal thing that people join before the age of 10 in response to subtle pressure from adults. By the time I washed my hands of the Baptist Church, it had been years since I’d seen anyone baptized who was old enough to drive.

  142. 142.

    Scotian

    I’ve been watching (and warning/fearing it too) the rise of the so called moral majority for most of my life. To see what it has become so out in the open what I long believed was true is no shock. However, the argument about how Trump is a changed man, how grace is possible, how forgiveness is essential, why is it I have yet to hear any reference to the thing needed for grace, for forgiveness, this little thing called REPENTANCE. If one has not repented how can one be seen as forgivable, or able to be in a state of grace? This used to be one of those self-evident truth things, and not just with the moral majority/Evangelicals either, but all Christians of all sects.

    Neither Tony Perkins nor Franklin Graham on CNN tonight seemed to even know of the word, but they were too busy defending their ends justifies the means support of Trump while trying to claim it was nothing of the sort explicitly while their arguments constantly reduced down to exactly that.

    I am a better Christian as a Buddhist Witch in my day to day life and actions than what I have witnessed tonight from these so called Christian leaders.

    Sickening, even by Trumpworld standards.

  143. 143.

    joel hanes

    @J R in WV:

    Having read the book from cover to cover several times, I hesitate to recommend it as a guide to life. At all.

    [The Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. — Mark Twain, Letters From Earth

    One of my less pleasant chores when I was young was to read the Bible from one end to the other. Reading the Bible straight through is at least 70 percent discipline, like learning Latin. But the good parts are, of course, simply amazing. God is an extremely uneven writer, but when He’s good, nobody can touch Him. — John W. Gardner

  144. 144.

    RobertDSC-Mac Mini

    @Citizen Alan:

    I just turned 43. I stood up New Years Eve.

    I grew up Catholic in a parish that stressed tolerance above whatever Rome was saying at the time. I drew away from the Catholic church for a host of reasons, then last year a friend invited me to her Christian church. I went for her, but the Word hit me in the right spot and my pastor’s teachings gave me a reason to get rid of the grief, guilt, and shame.

    Now, standing up doesn’t remove my political beliefs. Far from it. Some of my pastor’s commentary is directly opposed to my beliefs. But I take it and let it go by. For example, he mentioned the missile scare in Hawaii. At the end of his talk about that, he asked for a prayer for many pieces of society involved in that scare, with the last request for prayer being for the Orange Atrocity and his administration. I rejected that part entirely out of hand. I will never pray for their success. Ever.

  145. 145.

    Mnemosyne

    @Scotian:

    However, the argument about how Trump is a changed man, how grace is possible, how forgiveness is essential, why is it I have yet to hear any reference to the thing needed for grace, for forgiveness, this little thing called REPENTANCE. If one has not repented how can one be seen as forgivable, or able to be in a state of grace?

    Yes. This. I’ve read very scary things at Libby Anne’s Love Joy Feminism blog and other places about women and girls in evangelical and fundamentalist sects being pressured to publicly “forgive” the men who raped or molested them while those men say, “Jesus has forgiven me, so now you have to, too.” They skip right over repentance and making amends and, not surprisingly, those men do the same thing over and over again, announcing that they’ve been “forgiven by Jesus” each time.

    @RobertDSC-Mac Mini:

    I think it was Mark Twain who said something like, Christianity is a great religion — it’s a pity so few people follow it. It sounds like you’re doing your best to follow the true spirit and your inner light, and I applaud you for that.

  147. 147.

    Millard Filmore

    @J R in WV:

    Having read the book from cover to cover several times,

    I tried that once. Had to give up when it came to the “begats”.

  150. 150.

    Magda in Black

    @J R in WV:
    I think of it as “remedial religion.”
    It seldom gets past the rule following phase to the thinking/questioning/deciding for yourself phase.
    Thats intentional: poorly informed equals easily manipulated.

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