Tempting Faith

You know i've done a lot of Bush bashing on this blog, but to be honest with you there are some good things about his administration too. It is high time that i acknowledge them. Here is one for example. Bush has a healthy attitude twards the Radical Christian Right. Just note some of the ways his administration characterizes them: "the nuts", "ridiculous", "out of control", "just plain goofy".
So Bush is not all bad.

Actually i don't particularly care if Bush thinks evalgalists are cooks ... what does distrub me ... (should it prove to be true) ... is this ...

source: abc

Kuo also claims the White House used the taxpayer-funded Office of Faith-Based Initiatives to hold events designed to rally the evangelical conservative GOP members in 20 targeted races in 2002.

Kuo says Ken Mehlman -- then the political director of the White House, now the chairman of the Republican National Committee -- embraced the idea, though he wanted to make sure such events didn't seem to originate from campaigns. Kuo told "60 Minutes" that Mehlman was "thrilled."

"He just whipped off a bunch a names of particular races and said, 'We need to go there, there, there, there and there,'" Kuo said.

In his book, Kuo writes that Mehlman said, "It needs to come from the congressional offices" so it didn't look too political.

"We'll take care of that by having our guys call the office to request the visit," Mehlman said, according to Kuo's book.

Kuo says Republicans won 19 out of those 20 races, and he credits Preasident Bush's victory in the key swing state of Ohio that year "to the conferences we had launched two years before."

It was "spiritually wrong," Kuo told "60 Minutes." "You're taking the sacred and you're making it profane. You're taking Jesus and reducing him to some precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy."

There was more about this on 60 minutes and i'm not sure that i understand the story yet. My concern is where politicians compromise the political process in the name of faith ... where they use our tax dollars to advance their own political careers and at the same time pervert a religion. Of course, this is exactly what is happening with radical Islam ... and we can see the disasterous effects of that religious-political linkage. Now we smell the same thing happening in our own country. This is bad news.

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Mark de LA says
So Seth is not all bad.

Someday he will come up with something positive.

Seth says
Who knows whether the alligations in this book are true or not ... me thinks that they are pretty well streatched to sell books. I posted this item, however more to say that i hold Christian fundamentalist is just as low regard as i hold Muslim fundamentalists.

Seth says
Here is one article written by Tom Edsall who is refered to above ...

source: Washington Post
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said the grant-making is "corrupting."

"The danger is that any group that gets money from the government will end up serving the interests of the state rather than the constituencies they are trying to serve," he said. "The guy who writes the check writes the rules."

Seth says

Kuo also claims the White House used the taxpayer-funded Office of Faith-Based Initiatives to hold events designed to rally the evangelical conservative GOP members in 20 targeted races in 2002.

I would like to see some movies of these actual events. At least specifically where and when they were held ... maybe we can get some impressions from people who were there.

Seth says

source: Excerpts from Tempting Faith
On using the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives during campaign years to help Republicans locked in tight congressional races:

In 2002:

"A few days later, Jim [Towey] and I were sitting with Ken Mehlman, head of Political Affairs. We laid out a plan whereby we would hold 'roundtable events' for threatened incumbents with faith and community leaders. Our office would do the work, using the aura of our White House power to get a diverse group of faith and community leaders to a 'nonpartisan' event discussing how best to help poor people in their area. Though the Republican candidate would host the roundtable, it wouldn't be a campaign event

Tempting Faith

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