Armageddon ready to cancel my subscription

I really want to dig The New Republic like I did six years ago or so, but they insist on making it harder and harder. It's that icky combination of "I told you so" any time a right-wing policy isn't a complete disaster and gratuitous attacks at not just blogs, but liberals as a whole. This pointless article on David Kuo's fall from grace with the fundamentalist power players is a case in point:

Early Monday morning, a tell-all book from a former Bush White House official hit Washington like a small explosion, generating at least a color orange political threat level. Here was a conservative Republican, someone who had been on the inside of the president's signature domestic policy agenda of the first term, leveling damaging accusations of hypocrisy, wide-scale manipulation, and deceit. Conservatives reacted accordingly. They charged the traitor, former Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives David Kuo, with timing the book to do maximum damage in the midterm elections, and they compared him to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus. (. . .)

The reaction from the left has been, to put it mildly, slightly less vigorous. (. . .) This time, the responses have ranged from total silence to yawns to fears that the book could backfire on the Democratic Party. In general, most liberals have chosen to distance themselves from Kuo and his case. (. . .)

But something else is at play, too. Despite the evidence Kuo presents in Tempting Faith, liberals simply don't believe him. They've spent so much time fear-mongering about American theocracy that a book illustrating the opposite simply makes no sense to them. In fact, the real revelation of Kuo's book is not that the Bushies don't care about evangelicals; it's that liberals are too wedded to their views to capitalize on it.

For someone writing a book about religion and the left, the author sure seems determined to show off her ignorance. (Then again, considering Peter Beinart's pending book at a time when he was arguing the need for Democrats to go along with Bush's military agenda, maybe this is just an unfortunate new trend among TNR's writers-- choose hot button issue, take a calculatedly provocative stance, and hope for big sales.)

While there are plenty of people who acknowledge Bush's bone-chilling messianic streak, I can say pretty confidently that I've never heard anyone actually suggest that Bush, Cheney, Rove, et al., are making ready for Armageddon. No, pretty much the worst-kept secret of the current Republican party is their eagerness to exploit fringe groups to stay in power-- it's just taken the dupes a hell of a long time to catch on, if they've even managed that.

What the article completely fails to acknowledge is that even though the fundamentalists are being taken for a ride by plutocratic crooks, the GOP is more than happy to toss them some bones here and there that have very tangible, and very costly, consequences for the nation. To name just one, consider abstinence-only sex education. Considered the gold standard by fundamentalists, it's been a dismal failure that means more venereal disease and more teen pregnancy-- which means more abortions.

I could go on and on about the article's flawed logic and that obnoxious TNR strategy of attacking "the left" for the wrongdoing of the people actually in charge of this country. But I suspect you're as sick of reading this as I am of writing it.