While I’m a huge fan of Christopher Hitchens as a writer, let’s face it, the man can be a jackass. And while I largely share his views on organized religion, I find his condescension rather mean-spirited. So when he penned a column for Slate articulating “What I’ve learned from debating religious people around the world,” I was expecting the worst. And was thus pleasantly surprised.

I haven’t yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a “script” that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven’t been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell’s old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven’t yet agreed on the terms.

[...]

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can’t very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he’s marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don’t truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think. Every now and then I read reports of polls that tell me that more Americans believe in the virgin birth or the devil than believe in Darwinism: I’d be pretty sure that at least some of these are unwilling to confess their doubts to someone who calls them up on their kitchen phone.

To be sure, he gets in a barb here and there.  But what he’s discovered is that people of faith are often, if not usually, decent, intelligent folks with minds of their own.

Hitchens interprets this as a sign that religious faith is losing out to secularism, which he and I both consider “a wholly good development” and “part of the pluralism and polycentrism that distinguish the sort of society that we have to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  But I differ with him a bit in assessing the degree to which religiosity is withering versus simply evolving.   For a variety of cultural and psychological reasons, most Americans continue to be religious believers.  But they’re also children (or, perhaps more accurately, great-great grandchildren) of the Enlightenment and the Reformation.  So they hold onto the parts they believe or find comfort in and adapt the rest to fit the world they live in.

Leonce Gaiter believes that ,”If Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his former disciple, Barack Obama were white, this would not be a story.” He contends that, “White pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations. But it’s white bile, and that makes all the difference.”

Ezra Klein disagrees slightly, arguing, “Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique, and any Democratic candidate whose personal relationships implied a sympathy for that worldview would have a tough time of it.”

But I read Gaiter as saying something different than that. If a white pastor were saying exactly what Wright did, it would be, frankly, really strange. Even in the most liberal circles, not many white preachers are likely to think that AmeriKKKa is deliberately infecting blacks with the AIDS virus and so forth. Rather, Gaiter is arguing that it would not be news if a white pastor proclaimed the white equivalent of Wright’s views.

There, I think, he’s wrong. Indeed, I think the backlash would be much, much stronger. We’re simply more tolerant of racism and anti-Americanism coming from an elderly black man than from a white man because there’s a sense that our history entitled them to a certain bitterness.

Gaiter is correct that “white pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations.” But we’re not talking about some random yahoo behind a pulpit but rather a close associate and mentor of a leading contender for the presidency. If a white presidential candidate had sat in a pulpit listening to this sort of nonsense for two decades — and the church put out videos — you bet we’d hear about it.

Look at all the controversy that ensues when, for example, Republican candidates make a speech at Bob Jones University. In those cases, the politician is merely giving a speech. Even the more mainstream nonsense put out by the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson is heavily scrutinized — and rightly so — and candidates who are endorsed by these people are called on to renounce the more asinine comments.

Barack Obama has benefited tremendously by being a tabula rasa. His lack of experience and public record has mostly worked to his advantage until now. He’s a friendly, inspiring, fresh face upon whom people can project their own hopes, dreams, and values. Now, though, as he gets much closer to being the Democratic nominee, he’s coming under heavier scrutiny. And any damaging information is more powerful than it would otherwise be simply because people know relatively little about him.

My guess remains that he’ll mostly put this behind him and win the nomination and that it’ll have a marginal impact by the time the general election rolls around. If the race is close, with marginal outcomes in a handful of states deciding the outcome, this could be one of the things that decides it. But a dozen other issues and events will likely have a greater bearing on the outcome.

Two pieces today give insights into the longshot presidential bid of Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and the role of evangelical leaders in the Republican Party.

Michael Gerson notes Huckabee’s irritation that demonstrably less conservative opponents are garnering endorsements that should rightly be his.

When I asked former pastor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee his response to Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, he paused for a moment. “Surprised” was his understated reply. But his frustration was quickly evident. “Our Web site went nuts with people saying they will never give money to Robertson again.”

“There is a disconnect,” he went on, “between past generational leaders in Christian conservatism and their own followers.” Note the word “past.”

Robertson’s endorsement of a pro-choice presidential candidate is a transparent attempt to remain on the Republican train, even as it chugs away from the priorities of the religious right. It also symbolizes a fragmented political movement, which has recently seen Paul Weyrich’s endorsement of Mitt Romney and Sen. Sam Brownback’s support for John McCain.

An unsigned piece in The American Spectator, though, notes that Huckabee is about to get a very big endorsement.

Dr. James Dobson, who has largely been made irrelevant to the 2008 Republican presidential race, has apparently found his man, and according to an adviser, is ready to change the landscape of the Republican nomination race. “He is the leader of the evangelical and social conservative movement in America, and he’s going to reassert that position and leave no doubt that he’s in charge,” says the adviser based in Colorado.

Sources close to Dobson say that within the next ten days he is coordinating an endorsement plan with the presidential campaign of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. According to a Huckabee insider in Iowa, the event would be staged in that state at a rally, followed by a bus tour across the state, and an appearance by Huckabee on Dobson’s radio show, which is heard nationally.

Dobson’s endorsement, according to the Huckabee source, could mean millions in fundraising to the campaign, allowing it to compete at the same level with the top tier candidates Huckabee has been inching toward in the polls after a series of strong debate and campaign appearances. “It would help us get to the Thompson-McCain level if not higher,” says the source. “Dr. Dobson’s endorsement means that much.”

Dobson’s endorsement might also create a domino effect, as other evangelical and social conservatives have largely been withholding their endorsements, in part out of fear of angering Dobson and his many supporters who also fill crucial slots in other social conservative organizations run by such prominent leaders as Gary Bauer and Tony Perkins. Both men have been assisting multiple campaigns, with Bauer recently saying that he was providing advice to just about every campaign that sought his counsel.

One wonders, however, how important these endorsements are these days. There was a time, certainly, when a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson could swing hundreds of thousands of votes. Is that true anymore? Hasn’t the fragmentation of media taken away much of their sway?

For sure, the path to the Republican nomination still goes through the Deep South and Middle America and, therefore, proper homage must be paid to the holy trinity of God, guts, and guns. Beyond that, though, the Moral Majority is long gone and the Christian Coalition is a shadow of what it once was. Are there that many people willing to brave the elements to caucus in Iowa because James Dobson or Gary Bauer tell them to?

A recent piece in The Economist suggests not.

The problem is that Mr Dobson is not all that good at politics. He displays all the characteristic weaknesses of evangelical politicos—overreaching hopelessly and then blaming failure on want of political courage. He was the prime force behind both the fight to keep Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube in place and the push for a gay-marriage ban. But a majority of evangelicals disapproved of the first and a large number of his fellow social conservatives warned, rightly, that the second was a waste of effort.

There have been other miscalculations. He wasted political capital supporting Harriet Miers’s doomed nomination to the Supreme Court. He strongly opposed the 2006 Evangelical Climate Initiative. He accused SpongeBob SquarePants of participating in a “pro-homosexual video”. He argued that “The Da Vinci Code” “has all the evidence of something cooked up in the fires of hell” (wouldn’t it have been better written if it had been?). He compared Bill Frist’s call for increased federal funding for stem-cell research to Nazi experiments.

The 70-year-old Mr Dobson (who has already suffered a heart attack and a stroke) is increasingly looking like a relic of an ancien régime rather than a harbinger of a new order. The average age of people on Focus’s mailing list is 52. Mr Dobson and his acolytes are rapidly being displaced by what Mr Gilgoff calls a New New Right—people who are concerned about international justice and climate change as well as abortion and gay marriage, and people who are willing to work with liberal pressure groups over issues such as Sudan and sex slavery.

And a goodly number of those folks don’t vote in Republican primaries.

Some influential leaders of the Religious Right are threatening to leave the Republican party and support a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination, David Kirkpatrick reports.

The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians, participants said. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

The participants spoke on condition of anonymity because the both the Council for National Policy and the smaller meeting were secret, but they said members of the intend to publicize its resolution. These participants said the group chose the qualified term “consider” because they have not yet identified an alternative third party candidate, but the group was largely united in its plans to bolt the party if Mr. Giuliani became the candidate.

A revolt of Christian conservative leaders could be a significant setback to the Giuliani campaign because white evangelical Protestants make up a major portion of Republican primary voters. But the threat is risky for the credibility of the Christian conservative movement as well. Some of its usual grass-roots supporters could still choose to support even a pro-choice Republican like Mr. Giuliani, either because they dislike the Democratic nominee even more or because they are worried about war, terrorism and other issues.

While I find the notion that Christian conservatives have been insufficiently pandered to by the GOP somewhat amusing, I can understand their trepidation over Giuliani. He would be, by far, the least socially conservative nominee since Richard Nixon.

Then again, I’d argue that the issues where Giuliani is off the reservation are completely irrelevant from a policy standpoint. Ronald Reagan, the first president to ride the Moral Majority wave, served two terms and had a Republican majority in the Senate his first six years. George W. Bush is in his second term and had a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress for most of his first six years. What difference did it make on the social issues?

The courts, not the president, decides most of the key policy debates. Abortion is still legal thirty four years after Roe v. Wade and twenty seven years after Reagan was elected. It’s almost inconceivable that a Justice who would be a sure bet to overturn could get confirmed. Prayer in the schools? Nobody even talks about that these days. Gay marriage? Inevitable.

So, what issues that matter to social conservatives would, say, a President Fred Thompson be more likely to affect in a positive direction than Rudy Giuliani?

Berkeley Breathed has up this Note to Opus readers:

The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus’ host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.

That’s the end of his commentary, although he illustrates the page with this large single panel:

Q&O’s Billy Hollis excoriates these papers as “complete and utter cowards” who “have voluntarily handed over their own freedom to publish to the over-reactive sensitivities of medieval fanatics.” Ed Morrissey dubs it “Dhimmitude” and notes that, in running Breathed’s previous installment, they had “no problem satirizing Jerry Falwell and Christian beliefs of the afterlife.”

Editor and Publisher’s Dave Astor reported Thursday that,

At least 25 of the 200 or so “Opus” client newspapers might not run the Sunday-only comic’s next two episodes, which feature Islamic references and a sex joke. That’s according to Washington Post Writers Group Executive Sales Manager Karisue Wyson, when contacted today by E&P. WPWG Editorial Director/General Manager Alan Shearer added that more than 25 clients might not use the strips because the syndicate hasn’t heard from about 150 of the 200 papers it alerted. “Whenever something lands close to the edge, we give editors enough notice” in case they want to run substitute comics, said Shearer.

Berkeley Breathed’s Aug. 26 and Sept. 2 strips — which comprise sort of a two-part series — show the Lola Granola character wanting to become an Islamic radicalist (and wear traditional Muslim clothing) because it’s a “hot new fad on the planet.” Content also includes what Shearer described as “a sex joke a little stronger than we normally see.”

Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won’t publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. “They just don’t want to touch that,” she said. Violent protests took place after a Danish paper in 2005 published cartoons picturing Muhammad. Shearer told E&P that WPWG checked with a couple of Islamic experts to see if the “Opus” strips might be offensive, and they said the comics were OK. But he understands why some papers might still be wary.

Like Morrissey, I was a big fan of “Bloom County” during its run but I never cared for the “Outland” sequel or this one. And this particular installment doesn’t strike me as funny, not because it’s insulting to Muslims, but because most of the panels amount to wasted space. Still, it’s ridiculous not to run the strip.

What’s especially ironic is that Breathed manages to insult two religions in a single panel:

Somehow, I don’t think these papers were objecting to making fun of the Amish.

The full strip is thumbnailed at right. See my Danish Muslim Cartoons page for the collection of strips that sparked mass mayhem and instilled fear in the Western media establishment. See my Danish Muslim Cartoons category archives for previous posts on that subject.

James Carville has an editorial in the Financial Times, of all places, explaining “How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans.”

He’s generous in noting that, “If we concluded our analysis in 2007 and confined our judgment merely to Mr Rove’s immediate electoral record, we would have no choice but to judge him a spectacular success. There is no doubt that Mr Rove won elections. He has perhaps one of the most remarkable win-percentages in modern American politics.”

From there, though, he touts a series of polls showing that the Democrats have made huge gains among young voters (which Carville surely knows is an oxymoron) and swing voters. Naturally, he blames Rove. So far as it goes, he’s got a point. There’s not much doubt that the divide and conquer strategy had its cost.

Still, Carville takes this well beyond its logical conclusions:

Mr Rove’s famous electoral strategy – focusing on the Republican base first – is also largely responsible for a shift in international public opinion against the US. It would not be fair to blame Mr Rove for the Iraq war. But it is clearly fair to blame his strategy for the Terry Schiavo fiasco and the Republicans’ adherence to the policies and doctrines of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The world and now most of the US are contemptuous of the theocratic underpinnings of the policy Mr Rove ushered into government.

I thought the Republican majority’s actions in the Schiavo case were outrageous and said so frequently. Still, I’m rather sure they’d have taken place were Rove to have retired after the 2004 election. But the idea that Rove — or anyone else — has ushered into government some sort of theocracy is absurd. What policies and doctrines have been adhered to, pray tell?

The irresponsible interventions of the former Republican majority in Congress notwithstanding, Terry Schiavo was allowed to die. Otherwise: Abortion? Still legal. Prayer in public schools? Still illegal. Gay marriage and civil unions: More legal than they were under Bill Clinton or ever before.

It’s likely true that the Republican Platform is out of step with the consensus on these issues, since the platform has been essentially static since 1980 and the public view has shifted inexorably leftward. But that’s hardly Karl Rove’s doing.

He has been assistant to the president, senior advisor and deputy chief of staff. Mr Rove was the architect of social security reform, immigration, the hiring and firing of justice department officials and the placement of literally thousands of ideologically driven buffoons throughout the US government. As deputy chief of staff he was also responsible for handling the White House post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. On these actions, history has already rendered its judgment on Mr Rove. And, as we say in Louisiana, “it ain’t pretty”.

This ascribes too much to Rove, I think. Certainly, it’s absurd to lay Katrina at his doorstep. Social Security reform barely made a blip on the radar screen;surely, it’s not responsible for the GOP’s poll standings.

The McCain-Kennedy immigration bill was bipartisan and the opposition was almost entirely from the Right. That issue, more than perhaps any other save the Iraq War, has hurt the GOP. But it goes against the thesis that Rove was pandering to the base at all costs. Indeed, politically speaking, the president and the party would have been far better served adopting the Rovian strategy.

To the extent that the under-25 cohort is permanently alienated from the Republican Party — and I’m more than a little dubious that it’s so — it has much, much more to do with the war than with a polarizing political strategist. And, ultimately, it’s decision-makers, not advisers, who get the blame for that. To paraphrase Rove’s predecessor, “It’s the President, stupid.”

Jeffrey Trachtenberg chronicles the success of Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything in today’s WSJ.

[T]he biggest surprise is a blazing attack on God and religion that is flying off bookshelves, even in the Bible Belt. “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens, wasn’t expected to be a blockbuster. Its publisher, Twelve, a fledgling imprint owned by France’s Lagardère SCA, initially printed a modest 40,000 copies. Today, seven weeks after the book went on sale, there are 296,000 copies in print. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry calls a “dark week.” One experienced publishing veteran suggests that Mr. Hitchens will likely earn more than $1 million on this book.

A spin-off is already in the works. Rival publisher Da Capo Press, which is owned by Perseus Books LLC, got in touch with Mr. Hitchens and signed him up to edit, “The Portable Atheist,” a compilation of essays by such writers as Mark Twain and Charles Darwin that will be published in the fall. “This is atheism’s moment,” says David Steinberger, Perseus’s CEO. “Mr. Hitchens has written the category killer, and we’re excited about having the next book.”

I’m not sure why anyone’s surprised at this. There’s no subject more interesting to Americans than religion, and books and movies that incite controversy about religion always do well. And nobody does controversy better than Hitchens, arguably the most important non-fiction author of our time.

Mr. Hitchens, 58 years old, is well-known in media and political circles as an erudite raconteur and essayist; his Vanity Fair columns and frequent TV appearances on political shows have raised his profile. More recently, his loud support for the Iraq war has infuriated many of his former compatriots. His unabashed affection for alcohol and tobacco has been widely chronicled — sometimes by himself. “I smoke, sure, and I can take a drink when offered,” he says. “It’s impolite to decline.”

Now he has turned his caustic gaze on God and organized religion. “A heavenly dictatorship would be like living in a celestial North Korea, except it would be worse because they could read your thoughts even when you were asleep,” said Mr. Hitchens in an interview. “At least when you die you get out of North Korea, which is the most religious state I’ve ever seen.”

Like Maplethorpe Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” Scorsese and Kazantzakis “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” Hitchens is reaping the benefits of interest from both sides:

Part of what is driving the sales of “God is Not Great” falls under the concept of know thine enemy. Conservative-minded customers have been snapping up the book because they want to be familiar with its message, says Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. “There is a very strong presence of the religious right, and they want to know what’s being said and figure out how to move against it.”

Some of the same forces were at work last fall when Bertelsmann AG’s Alfred Knopf had a surprise hit with Sam Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation,” which questioned whether the Bible is the work of God, and Houghton Mifflin Co., a unit of Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group PLC, successfully published “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Today there are 500,000 hardcover copies of Mr. Dawkins’s book in print, and 185,000 hardcover copies of Mr. Harris’s book in print.

But those guys are pikers compared to Hitchens, who is a master of the outrageous analogy and speaking ill of the dead:

Mr. Hitchens makes a passionate case against organized religion as well as theocratic, fundamentalist states. He writes that “religion is not unlike racism.” “Literature is a better source of ethics and a better source of reflection than our holy texts,” he says. “People should read George Eliot, Dostoyevsky and Proust for moral leadership.”

[...]

Booksellers say Mr. Hitchens has helped his own cause by staging colorful confrontations with religious figures and by making incendiary statements about the late Jerry Falwell. On “Anderson Cooper 360,” Mr. Hitchens was asked if he thought Mr. Falwell would go to heaven. His response: “No. And I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.”

Says Barbara Meade, a co-owner of the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.: “Part of the appeal is that he’s a personality; we sold 106 books when he visited our store.”

When Mr. Hitchens debated Al Sharpton at the New York Public Library recently, the event made national news after the Rev. Sharpton attacked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith. An estimated 1,000 turned out in Miami to listen to Mr. Hitchens challenge a panel that included an Orthodox Jew and a Buddhist nun. “I now wish I hadn’t participated,” says Nathan Katz, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University. “He was utterly abusive. It had the intellectual level of the Jerry Springer Show.”

Polite academic debates don’t sell books. Nor, frankly, are they as much fun when done with the level of skill Hitchens brings to the table.

Mr. Hitchens says he has received surprisingly little hate mail since his book was published. What does he think readers have learned from “God is Not Great?” “That your life is probably better led after you’ve outgrown the idea that the universe has a plan for you,” he says. “The cosmos isn’t designed with you in mind. You might as well just consult an astrological chart.”

That’ll sell another 100,000 copies.

In response to the news of Christian terrorists plotting to blow up protestors at Jerry Falwell’s funeral, Steve Benen offers this food for thought:

For my friends on the right, consider a question: if I told you that Virginia law enforcement had apprehended a young religious man who was caught with five bombs in his car — bombs which he intended to use — wouldn’t your very first question be about his faith tradition and nationality? Wouldn’t you necessarily label him a terrorist?

You’ll note that I applied the “terrorism” tag to my post this morning. Yes, these people were would-be terrorists. Still, I tend to put those like this guy and the idiots who run over university students in the name of Allah into the category of “nutjobs” and think of them differently than the calculated plotters who plan serious attacks.

Still, while I’ve taken plenty of heat from my side of the aisle for not finding terrorists under every tree, I would not go so far as David Neiwert, who claims “you’re far more likely to be harmed in an attack by a right-wing domestic terrorist than anyone from Al Qaeda.” Frankly, most of us are vanishingly unlikely to be harmed by either.

Starting with a list of deaths from terrorist attacks at Wikipedia, I eliminated those that occurred outside the USA unless it was immediately recognizable as an attack that targeted Americans and/or killed a significant numbers of Americans. For a variety of reasons, I excluded attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, which skew the data considerably in my direction.

* 2,997 – September 11, 2001 attacks, (New York City, Arlington, VA, Shanksville, PA, United States, 2001)
* 307 – 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, (Beirut, Lebanon, 1983)
* 270 – Pan Am Flight 103, (Lockerbie, Scotland, 1988)
* 257 – 1998 United States embassy bombings 1998
* 168 – Oklahoma City bombing, (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, 1995)
* 38 – Wall Street bombing, (New York City, 1920)
* 33 – Virginia Tech Massacre, (United States, 2007)

Color code:

Red=Al Qaeda
Maroon=Other Islamists
Blue=Christian nuts
Green=Plain nuts
Orange=Italian anarchists

So, by my rough calculations, the score is al Qaeda 3254, Christians 168.

Now, the list is incomplete, excluding incidents that killed fewer than 30 people. That omits two al Qaeda attacks that come immediately to mind, the 1993 WTC bombing (6 killed) and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole (17). It also leaves off KKK lynchings and abortion clinic bombings.

Still, al Qaeda’s toll is at least 3277. And, again, that excludes all Americans killed in Iraq by al Qaeda and its affiliates. The Christian count stands at 168.

To be sporting, let’s start the race in 1988, the earliest date al Qaeda can be said to exist, even in its prototypical state. And long before it murdered its first American. Have 3109 Americans been killed by domestic Christian terrorists that have been left off the list?

A bomb plot targeting Jerry Falwell’s funeral was thwarted by police yesterday. And, no, it’s not what you think. ABC News has the details:

Campbell County authorities arrested a Liberty University student for having several homemade bombs in his car. The student, 19-year-old Mark D. Uhl of Amissville, Va., reportedly told authorities that he was making the bombs to stop protesters from disrupting the funeral service. The devices were made of a combination of gasoline and detergent, a law enforcement official told ABC News’ Pierre Thomas. They were “slow burn,” according to the official, and would not have been very destructive.

“There were indications that there were others involved in the manufacturing of these devices and we are still investigating these individuals with the assistance of ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], Virginia State Police and FBI. At this time it is not believed that these devices were going to be used to interrupt the funeral services at Liberty University,” the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office said in a release.

Three other suspects are being sought, one of whom is a soldier from Fort Benning, Ga., and another is a high school student. No information was available on the third suspect.

Quite bizarre. One would think there would be something in the Liberty curriculum about how murdering people is strongly discouraged by the 6th Commandment. Then again, crazy people — usually my operative assumption in cases such as this — tend to have their own interpretations of these things.

Predictable though it was, the tidal wave of vitriol that has followed Jerry Falwell’s death earlier this week has been truly disgusting. De mortuis, nihil nisi bonum? Forget about it. The death of a public figure now serves only to underscore the earlier death of civility in our public discourse. Which makes the brief mention of Falwell’s passing from the most unlikely of sources: Larry Flynt (who Falwell sued in 1983, taking the case all the way to the SupCt) all the more refreshing. The pr0n king shows a lot more class than, well, a lot of people:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s very little in the agenda Jerry Falwell spent his life promoting with which I agree. Constantly having to answer for Falwell and his fellows simply because they support the same party in a two-party system is a source of frequent irritation to me. The Religious Right is the favourite bogeyman of the Left, yet there’s never been any real danger tof their agenda having more than a small influence on the margins of American law. As such, I’ve found myself more than a few times pointing out to liberals for whom “well, what about the Religious Right?” is the first line of attack in any debate with someone on the right, that they present a much larger problem for me than for them. They aren’t forced to answer for the Religious Right every time they talk politics with someone on the other side of the aisle.

So Falwell was never more than a nominal ally of mine, especially in the last decade or so as his influence waned and his penchant for going over the top and saying things any long-term public figure should know better than to say waxed. But, unlike some others in his camp, I never saw any reason to believe that Falwell was motivated by anything other than what he genuinely believed, by his own lights, to be good and proper policy. That I largely disagreed with him on what would constitute good policy was no reason to hate him. Too bad more of his fellows can’t be more like Larry Flynt.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey shares some similar thoughts and provides a link to a longer eulogy by Flynt himself in the LA Times.

Jerry Falwell has died.

Evangelist Jerry Falwell died Tuesday after he was found unresponsive in his office, an official at Liberty University told CNN. Falwell, 73, was rushed to a Lynchburg, Virginia, hospital, where he was given CPR.

Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 and is a nationally known voice for conservative Christian views. (Watch Jerry Falwell’s rise to fame Video) In 1956, the 22-year-old minister started Thomas Road Baptist Church with just 35 members, according to his Web site. The church now has more than 24,000 members. Shortly after starting the Lynchburg church, Falwell began broadcasting the “Old Time Gospel Hour” radio and television ministries. He founded Liberty University in 1971.

Falwell has found himself at the center of several controversies, such as the one sparked by his comments two days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which he seemed to blame “abortionists,” gays, lesbians, the ACLU and People for American Way for causing the attacks, saying they “helped this happen.” On September 14, 2001, he told CNN that he would “never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize.”

Falwell was a catalyst in bringing Christian evangelicals into active politics and helping broaden the Republican coalition. Unfortunately, he often became a symbol for what was wrong with the Christian Right rather than a force for good in the mold of Billy Graham.

John Cole “won’t miss him” but thinks “now is not the time” for ugliness. I would concur. I disagreed with Falwell on most matters religious and much politically but he was not an evil man.

Hot Air is tracking reactions from some of the darker corners of the left blogosphere. As might be expected, they’re not very friendly. The moderators at HuffPo wisely decided to close comments rather than serve as a message board for vitriol.

UPDATE: Bob Owens rounds up more lefty reactions and doesn’t have to dig around the Democratic Underground to find examples.

Hotline’s Marc Ambinder strikes the right balance:

Fallwell fused contemporary Christian moralism with political conservatism. Being “born again” became a badge of honor in Republican politics. He was opportunistic at the right moments, was always eager to inflame cultural trigger points, and was a master of the media. More than any one man save Ronald Reagan, Falwell brought white evangelicals to the Republican Party and made sure that their concerns were only one rung below communism in the party’s hierarchy of concerns.

With the movement, Falwell had detractors. His preference for political oppositionalism — in insisting that Christians were persecuted by modern politics and had to aggressively wage war against modernism to break free — was a grave error, according to critics. Evangelical Christianity became synonymous with Christian fundamentalism, and that small trick of language sublimated the political impulses of modernist evangelicals for decades. Others simply felt that he was crass, politically opportunistic and simply, mean.

Marc Ambinder has two pieces in Hotline on Call today that strike me as interrelated. This morning, he wrote about a memo from Brent Seaborn, Rudy Giuliani’s strategy director, arguing that his candidate can win California in 2008, a feat no Republican has accomplished in the twenty years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis. The memo is poorly written and rather fact-challenged but the thesis, that Giuliani is attracting across-the-board support and could be Clinton in California and other states not traditionally in play, is plausible.

This afternoon, Ambinder cautions Republicans not to worship too much at the alter of Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan pulled the spokes together: anti-communism, traditional moral values, strong nat’l defense and lower taxes. Those ideas survived, but without Reagan to sell them, they proved incapable of producing a governing majority themselves.

By and large, the GOP has rejected “compassionate conservatism” and is looking for something new. But the GOP candidates all seem to want to channel Reagan, as if his spirit alone can save the party. Some lace their speeches with “optimism” — literally, the word. Others wonder what Reagan would do in the face is Islamic terror. Still others go so far as to compare their political journey’s to Reagan’s. None comes close to capturing Reagan’s essence.

The reason no post-Reagan Republican has managed this is rather obvious: The end of the Cold War removed anti-Communism from the equation. Further, the Reagan tax cuts, which took a confiscatory top bracket down from 70 percent to 38 percent, made further reforms less urgent.

Post 9/11, national security has resumed its prominence on the national agenda and is arguably the reason George W. Bush managed to get re-elected despite a mediocre first term. The unpopularity of the Iraq War, not to mention its mismanagement under Republican governance, makes that a harder sell in 2008.

The key, then, is finding a leader who can both energize the Republican base of fiscal and social conservatives while not alienating — or, heaven forfend, actually appealing to — moderates and the slightly-left-of-center.

This partly answers the question, “Why Fred Thompson” that Alex Knapp and Kevin Drum have posed. He’s a likable, charismatic fellow who comes across as honest and strong. He’s also a virtual unknown from a policy sense and has little real experience unless one counts move roles.

Giuliani, on the other hand, is charismatic and experienced. He’s likable on the stump. He’s sufficiently centrist, or even left-of-center, on the most divisive social issues that he doesn’t scare away the moderates and his stances on security issues seem, so far at least, to dampen the concerns of all but the most ardent members of the Jerry Falwell wing of the base. And, frankly, they’re not voting for Hillary Clinton.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has managed to twice win election as governor of California under the GOP banner. It’s not inconceivable that Giuliani could pull it off, especially against Clinton.

Twenty years ago, the Republicans were said to have a “lock” on the Electoral College, having won every presidential election but one over the previous twenty years — and the exception, 1976, was a narrow loss that took Watergate, an accidental nominee, and a Democrat who was arguably more conservative than the Republican. As Ambider notes, that suddenly changed in 1992: “Thanks to Pete Wilson, illegal immigration, migration, cultural politics or something else entirely, Democrats don’t worry about the state.”

California is no doubt a much more liberal state than it was in 1988. Still, Giuliani is arguably to the left of Clinton on illegal immigration and he’s certainly not under Pat Robertson’s thumb. He’s more popular than she is among virtually every segment of the community. Why couldn’t he win?

It’s quite conceivable, though, that Giuliani’s support — like Barack Obama’s — is as high now as it’s ever going to be. People don’t know him as well as they do Clinton and what most of them do “know” is good. There are plenty of ugly stories about heavy-handed police tactics that will get more fully aired. People will be reminded of his divorces and the unseemly circumstances surrounding them. On the other hand, it may simply be that nobody will much care what he did before 9/11. That may have wiped away all past sins.

If so, he’s got a shot.

God has issued more predictions for the coming year, in the person of his messenger Pat Robertson.

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007. “I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

Robertson said God also told him that the U.S. only feigns friendship with Israel and that U.S. policies are pushing Israel toward “national suicide.”

Robertson suggested in January 2006 that God punished then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a stroke for ceding Israeli-controlled land to the Palestinians.

The broadcaster predicted in January 2004 that President Bush would easily win re-election. Bush won 51 percent of the vote that fall, beating Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

In 2005, Robertson predicted that Bush would have victory after victory in his second term. He said
Social Security reform proposals would be approved and Bush would nominate conservative judges to federal courts. Lawmakers confirmed Bush’s 2005 nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. But the president’s Social Security initiative was stalled.

“I have a relatively good track record,” he said. “Sometimes I miss.”

You’d think he’d be batting 1.000 given the omniscience of his sources. Then again, any god who would use Pat Robertson as his press secretary has to have a sense of humor.

Related posts below the fold.

Pat Robertson: Muslims Satanic
White House Rebukes Robertson for Sharon Remarks
Who Speaks for the Evangelicals?
Pat Robertson: God Punished Sharon for Giving Up Land
Robertson Called for Assassinations Before
Pat Robertson Advocates Assassination
Rooting Against the Religious Right
Left Aims to Smite Theocracy€™ Movement
Jerry Falwell in Critical Condition
Ralph Reed Eyeing Georgia Governorship, White House
How Powerful is the €˜Religious Right€™?
MAINSTREAMING THE FRINGE
GOD PICKS BUSH
ROBERTSON ON LIMBAUGH
ENDORSEMENTS YOU DON’T WANT
TROLL ALERT
ROBERTSON REDUX
ROBERTSON
PAT ROBERTSON
DIFFERENT GOP?

In Albemarle County Virginia pagans were able to distribute fliers about their weekend yuletide rituals in public school’s “backpack mail”. Backpack mail is when a school uses special folders that are placed the students backpacks to ensure that important notices and fliers get home to the parents. What made it possible for the Pagans to use the system was a threatened lawsuit by Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Counsel.

The dispute started last summer when Gabriel and Joshua Rakoski, twins who attend Hollymead Elementary School, sought permission to distribute fliers about their church’s Vacation Bible School to their peers via “backpack mail.” Many public schools use special folders placed in student backpacks to distribute notices about schools events and sometimes extra-curricular activities to parents.

School officials originally denied the request from the twins’ father, Ray Rakoski, citing a school policy barring “distribution of literature that is for partisan, sectarian, religious or political purposes.”

A Charlottesville weekly newspaper, The Hook, reports that Rakoski “sicced the Liberty Counsel on the county,” and the policy was soon revised to allow religious groups to use the backpack mail system. Liberty Counsel is a Religious Right legal group founded by Mathew Staver and now affiliated with Falwell.

I think this is simply fantastic. I love to see the unintended consequences of the hard-headed come back and bite such people on their butts. I think I’ll celebrate with the egg nog and rum tonight.

If there was any doubt how badly John McCain wanted to be president, let it end now: McCain is going to be the graduation speaker at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

U.S. Sen. John McCain – a likely 2008 presidential candidate who once labeled the Rev. Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance” – will be Liberty University’s graduation speaker on May 13.

“I was in Washington with him about three months ago,” Falwell said. “We dealt with every difference we have. There are no deal breakers now. But I told him, ‘You have a lot of fence mending to do.’” Falwell, LU’s chancellor, said McCain, an Arizona Republican, is among the presidential candidates he could support in 2008. “This is not an endorsement,” Falwell said.

Goodness, the only thing appealing about John McCain is his “maverick” image and willingness to risk offending people like Falwell. What, Bob Jones University wouldn’t invite him?

Lynchburg News & Advance reporter Ron Brown points out, “McCain’s visit to the LU campus is, at the very least, an attempt to make peace with conservative Christians prior to the presidential campaign.”

Courting the base is essential and Falwell is right to say that McCain has some fences to mend. But this move just makes him look desperate. Brown again:

While running against then- Gov. George W. Bush in the South Carolina and Virginia primaries in 2000, McCain denounced Falwell and Virginia Beach televangelist Pat Robertson in what was seen as a move to lure more moderate voters to his campaign. “Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right,” McCain said at the time.

So, he’s going to the equivalent of Louis Farrakhan University to engraciate himself with the Republican Al Sharpton?

I believe our maverick has lost that lovin’ feeling.