Alongside the Michael Gerson piece I blogged about yesterday, the ever-more ridiculous Washington Post published a little puff piece by Hanna Rosin approving of the growing infestation of the U.S. federal bureaucracy by a hard right-wing evangelical Christian cult.
"Blessed Be the Ideologues," is its title on the opinion page, and it opens with one of the great paragraphs in the history of hypocrisy:
To the Bush haters of America, the young Monica Goodling is a footnote of this wretched era, one of the many Washington types that they'll be happy to get rid of come January 2009: Venal Vice President, Ex-Lobbyists Turned Regulators and, in Goodling's case, Young Evangelicals in High Places.So much for the Golden Rule, I guess, when it comes to political name-calling.
The point of Rosin's piece, such as it is, is that these zealots are here to stay. "Falwell and Robertson were outsiders and always behaved like it," she states without apparent irony of the founder of the "Moral Majority" and the recent candidate for President of the United States. But this generation has made it:
Goodling's Christian contemporaries grew up with Bush as their president, speaking their language. Even after this administration is gone, they can work for one of the more than 150 members of Congress who call themselves evangelical or dozens of conservative think tanks and activist groups.Praise Je-sus, for wingnut welfare. Rosin couldn't be prouder of the foundering federal system these sheep have starred in providing us, even trumping my recent parody by proposing "Goodlings" as a name for the blessed avatars of Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell's righteousness:
It used to be that being 33 and in charge of 93 U.S. attorneys would mean you'd been top of your class at Harvard or Yale or clerked at the Supreme Court. Now, Christian schools are joining that mix. Regent has had 150 of its graduates working in the White House; the school estimates that one-sixth of its alumni are in government work. Call them the Goodlings: scrubbed young ideologues, ready to serve their nation, the right's version of the Peace Corps generation...."Scrubbed," just like Bush's National Guard records. Rosin continues:
[S]tudents at Patrick Henry College, a seven-year-old school founded in much the same spirit as Regent...easily matched Goodling's description of herself as "anal retentive." They input their daily schedules into Palm Pilots in 15-minute increments -- read Bible, do crunches, take shower, study for Latin quiz. They intern at the White House. The atmosphere is much more Harvard than Bob Jones.They sound to me like perfect little brownshirts.
Absent from Rosin's analysis is any sense of the shortcomings of this kind of dogmatism. She proudly reports that "evangelical college students were remarkably unified in their political identification," more than two-thirds of them identifying as Republican and only 9% Democratic. She's unable to confirm a rumor that someone at one of these schools actually voted for John Kerry.
Rosin just isn't really very interested in Goodling's criminal conduct at the U.S. Dept. of Justice, obscuring it in a lame "look, something shiny," bad news/good news formulation that doesn't begin to pass the laugh test:
While testifying this week, Goodling admitted that she had asked inappropriately partisan questions of applicants for civil service jobs. But she never asked about religion, she said. Unlike their elders, the new generation of evangelicals does not turn the cubicle into a pulpit. If they are intent on implementing God's will, they do it with professional discretion.But everybody knows a Goodling can smell a wolf even in the dark.
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