Truth - Al Franken [47]
Unless—wait. It’s just occurred to me.
Could it be that these purportedly gay demonstrators from San Francisco were actually Republicans from Florida trying to peel off some African-American Kerry votes at the last moment? And would that explain why these demonstrators turned and ran when a couple of Democrats started filming them?
Hmm.
Come to think of it, I followed the campaign pretty closely, and I don’t remember ever hearing Kerry call for the Bible to be banned. In fact, he’s an observant Catholic. Could the Republicans have made up the Bible-ban thing?
If so, then maybe the Bush campaign had financed those crazy African-American robo-calls, even though they denied it.
I guess we’ll never know the real story. We’ll never know whether it was a series of inexplicable, suicidal mistakes by the Kerry team, or a systematic dirty-tricks campaign by Republicans eager to use religion and homophobia to divide America. But we do know that, since the beginning of their first term as president, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove mounted a concerted, relentless effort to recapture the 4 million religious conservative voters who, according to Rove, had not turned out in 2000. Some observers claim that this effort was the key to the election. I, and even more importantly, the data, disagree. As it so happens, the religious right’s turnout went up about the same amount as everyone else’s. But that doesn’t forgive Bush, Cheney, and Rove’s incredibly shameless and cynical abuse of sincere religious faith. Only God can do that. Ironic.
From the earliest days of the first Bush-Cheney-Rove administration, the White House held regular conference calls with people like James Dobson from Focus on the Family, Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship and the Watergate cover-up, and Reverend Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. Per their instructions, White House policymakers would sometimes take breaks from lining the pockets of extremely wealthy cronies in order to pander to fundamentalist voters by cutting off aid to family planning groups in desperately poor countries, restricting stem cell research, and ensuring that a “partial-birth abortion” ban being considered by Congress would not include an exception for the health of the mother.
Rove also courted the Christian conservative vote more directly, by funneling money to churches. One plank of Bush’s 2000 “compassionate conservative” platform was fighting poverty by supporting faith-based initiatives. John DiIulio, Bush’s first director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, resigned once he realized that the program’s focus was on politics rather than on actually helping people. But DiIulio’s successor, Jim Towey, had no such qualms. Towey oversaw the distribution of over a billion dollars to carefully selected religious groups. Thanks to his efforts and the tireless work of congressional Republicans, it is impossible to account for almost all of that money, but we do know that two thirds of Towey’s trips during 2004 were to battleground states. When the Los Angeles Times confronted him about this, Towey defended his travel schedule with what I call a non-denial acknowledgment: “If you look at where the battleground states are, it’s where the action is in the faith-based initiative.” Right. Exactly.
Towey also differed from DiIulio in that he was willing to go on the offense against “the secular extremists” hell-bent on “creating a godless orthodoxy,” as he put it in a speech at the taxpayer-sponsored White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. And he told the Christian conservative magazine World, “I would expect that Senator Kerry, if he was elected, would stick the Faith-Based Initiative in the Smithsonian.”
Most Democrats have no problem with churches, synagogues, and, to a lesser extent, mosques, receiving federal money to provide services to the needy. In fact, the feds have been funding faith-based