POLJUNK

So, what are they to do with John McCain, a man who barely keeps his contempt for the religious right in check? Will they actually vote for this phoney or will John McCain actually do the GOP a favor by losing and finally putting a sliver of separation back into government and religion?

It all had to end sometime, though, and that sometime might be now. Nervous, white, sexually inhibited Protestants with fourth-grade educations are becoming a smaller and smaller share of the country's population, and the Christian right is increasingly frustrated with the Republican Party's failure to transform America into a fundamentalist caliphate. (Forget about abortion: After eight years of Republican rule, Christians can't even put up the Ten Commandments in Alabama without someone bitching about it.) But the last straw just might come down to one Republican politician's personal idiosyncrasies. All the party needed was one more pious, Scripture-quoting, hair-spray-soaked whore to hold this thing together for another four years, and instead they got John McCain. And John McCain may break up three decades of GOP Jesus-flogging simply because he is too afraid to get his forehead wet. Wouldn't that be something?

Yes, indeed it would!

The Moral Majority Christians and the supply-side neocons always represented two of the worst and most vile impulses in the American character — mass, willful ignorance and total, shameless greed.

Oh, that hurts. Taibbi has a way of sticking it to his targets in a ruthless, Hunter S. Thompson-worthy way. God bless him.

In one wing of the ruling-party mansion they housed preachers who transformed the religion of "turn the other cheek" and "go, give away all your possessions to the poor" into a "Christianity" that celebrated shock-and-awe bombing and assault-rifle ownership and decried the progressive income tax as unfair to the propertied class. In the other wing they housed "conservatives" who turned the party of limited government into a giant snooping apparatus, one that borrowed trillions against the future earnings of ordinary taxpayers and sacrificed thousands of lives to snatch a few Middle Eastern oil wells for companies that were rich as hell to begin with.

And that's the most baffling result of this unholy reunion: how have they been able to dupe so many people for so long? To get people to not only vote against their economic interests, but to abandon the very foundation of their moral beliefs? Astonishing!

It was at this low point in the Christian-corporate marriage that John McCain stepped into the breach to wreck the demographic even more. At this critical moment, the party needed a turbocharged con man to revive the old religion, and what they got was an old man with doubts who can barely bring himself to go to church on Sundays. The worst possible scenario. Or the funniest, depending on how you look at things.

Awesome. The whole article deserves a read. Do it now.