Whackos!

I've always wanted to start a post like this:

Michael Kinsely once defined a "gaffe" as when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Check out this gaffe by Tom Delay's former aide, Michael Scanlon. He wrote, in a memo to a lobbying client, the Coushatta Native American Tribe in Louisiana that he could mobilize the religious right to help protect their gambling industry. Except, here's how he described the Christian Right:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

The whackos! And here I thought I was the effete East Coast liberal snob!

To my surprise, we have a reader or two that stop by this blog and who would describe themselves as conservative and religious. I've corresponded with one of them, a delightful guy who took with good cheer that he and I disagree on just about everything.

But, you see, for all the bad I've said about the religious right, and for all the nasty things I have called them and probably will call them, and for all the bad their side has said about people like me and for all the bad they'll say in the future -- us normal people don't go around trying to manipulate each other as part of some crass dance. I know, I know, they don't dance. It's sinful. Well... it's hard to dance to Clint Black. If God had wanted them to dance, he would have given them decent music.

See? We make fun of each other. That's the American way. Remember, Religious Right... cynical manipulation is a sissy tactic. So even if you think us city-dwelling lefties are pampered, hedonistic distortions of humanity... we ain't sissies like that guy who worked so closely with Tom Delay. I might be a latte drinking, cigarette smoking, mostly black clothes wearing, nihilist relativist. But at least I let you know what I think of you all when you try to sneak creationism into public schools. It's that guy who claims to represent you that's the liar and who doesn't think enough of you to say what he really thinks about you in public.

Remember I said that.

Because, some day, I have no doubt, some lefty leader who I'll like a lot will reveal himself to think that I and people like me are just something to be manipulated too.

While we all debate where we are and where we should be going and how we should be getting there, too many of our representatives aren't. I've always suspected that, absent the election in 2004, that if George Bush and John Kerry were given the choice to spend an evening hanging out together, or hanging out with their most genuinely fervent supporter, they'd chose each other.