Truth - Al Franken [54]
As the Times reported on November 4, Dobson and his 1.2 million followers weren’t alone in calling in their marker:
Austin Ruse, president of the conservative Catholic Culture of Life Foundation, suggested that if Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist steps down, Mr. Bush could begin to repay his social conservative backers by naming Justice Antonin Scalia to replace him. “We’d love to see Scalia in that spot, and I think we have earned it,” Mr. Ruse said.
Oddly, it fell to Chuck “When You’ve Got Them by the Balls, Their Hearts and Minds Will Follow” Colson to urge restraint:
I am tired of reading articles about evangelicals voting for Bush because they want to “get something” from him, and I disassociate myself from anyone who says, “Now we voted for you, it’s payback time. Give us our due.” That’s what special interest groups do, and we’re not a special interest group.
But Colson’s sage counsel was drowned out, as the Christian generals who thought they’d won the culture war rushed in to claim the spoils.
In the Oval Office, in the halls of Congress, and in the oxygenated bubble at the bottom of Karl Rove’s cesspool where the real decisions are made, the conventional wisdom congealed instantly, like a blood clot. The right believed the country had moved to the right. They believed Dobson, not Colson, and believed there’d be hell to pay if they failed to cater to the demands of Dobson’s Christian soldiers.
Republican leaders believed that if there came a time when they were called upon to demonstrate absolute, unquestioning, extra-constitutional fealty to their theocratic allies, they would have no choice but to do so, and to do so with the utmost enthusiasm—no matter what.
Even if, in the President’s case, it meant interrupting a vacation.
Such a time would come soon. It would make household names of Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist. It would spark a nation’s interest in living wills, durable powers of attorney for health care, and the legal distinctions between those two documents. But perhaps even more importantly, it would come to symbolize Republican overreach—and fuel a mainstream backlash that would discredit Dobson’s delirious dream of domination. Bush’s pretensions to a mandate would be brushed away like so many cobwebs in the path of a bulldozer.
They thought the Bible had made them omnipotent.
But God had other plans.
8 Al Franken Talks About God
I’m Jewish. So, I suppose I’m not really in much of a position to argue that conservatives have hijacked Christianity. And I haven’t read the New Testament from cover to cover. But from what I understand, if you cut out all the passages in the Bible where Jesus talks about the poor, about helping out the least among us—if you cut out every one of those passages, you’d have the perfect container to smuggle Rush Limbaugh’s drugs in.
My views about God come from my Dad. He died twelve years ago, of lung cancer. Which brings me to a funny story.
Dad died at home. My brother and I both came back to Minnesota to be with him and Mom for what turned out to be the last three weeks of his life. About a week before Dad died, we got a call from Rabbi Black, who asked me if he could come over and talk to him. I thought about it for a moment and told the rabbi that I didn’t think so. Dad knew he was dying. He knew we knew he was dying. But we never discussed it as such, and I just didn’t want Dad to have to talk about his death unless he brought it up himself.
A couple days later Rabbi Black called again. Could he come over and comfort my mother? Well, Mom was a total wreck by then, and if someone was capable of giving her any comfort, it would certainly have been a relief for me and my brother. Sure, Rabbi. So Rabbi Black came over and sat in our living room with the three of us for however long, and I don’t remember a thing he said, other than: “Would it be okay if I could see your father?” The thought instantly crossed my mind that the comforting Mom bit was just a way for the rabbi to