The moral majority is neither

I close out most days listening to KGO 810 khz on the AM radio dial. I often have 2 choices of who I am going to get to listen to at this late hour; Bernie Ward or Dr. Bill Wattenburg.

I like Bernie. He is an apologist left-leaning, terrorist loving Liberal just like me… obviously hates freedom and everything that stands for it.

Dr. Bill Wattenburg is the other side of the coin. He swaddles himself in the American flag, supports the troops and those that support the troops and thinks Nuclear power is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Afterall, Dr. Bill Wattenburg invented Nuclear power, the transistor, electricity, the i-Pod and the internet. You name it.

Anyway – it is a good night when Bernie is on.
When he is not pontificating on the never-ending attack on freedom in America he is hitting the proverbial nail on the head on just about everything else clear-thinking Americans (and us Canadians to the North… we are all, afterall, linked at the border…) should concern themselves with.

And I might not be the most gifted listener around, but when Bernie brings something up, I tend to remember it, follow-up on it and dig a little deeper.

One of the things that scares Bernie more than anything else is the incursion into all levels of government by the nut-job religious right.
The federal government. Local governments. State governments. Municipal governments. No governmental agencies has been spared this frightening new cancer.

Enter freelance writer and author Michelle Goldberg.
After a year of traveling and reporting in India and East Asia, Michelle Goldberg moved to New York City and took a job as a news and politics reporter with Salon.com. There she covered all aspects of the ascendant political right, from the neocons to the theocrats. She was one of the first to expose how a tiny far-right Catholic sect convinced President Bush to cut off support for the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes reproductive health care and safe childbirth in the third world. She wrote about faith-based abstinence-only education and crisis pregnancy centers and about the right-wing attempts to take over the federal judiciary.

Scary stuff. Well she wrote a great book called Kingdom Coming

“In Kingdom Coming, Goldberg demonstrates how an increasingly bellicose fundamentalism is gaining traction throughout our national life, taking us on a tour of the parallel right-wing evangelical culture that is buoyed by Republican political patronage. Deep within the red zones of a divided America, we meet military veterans pledging to seize the nation in Christ’s name, perfidious congressmen courting the confidence of neo-confederates and proponents of theocracy, and leaders of federally funded programs offering Jesus as the solution to the country’s social problems.”

“With her trenchant interviews and the telling testimonies of the people behind this movement, Goldberg gains access into the hearts and minds of citizens who are striving to remake the secular Republic bequeathed by our founders into a Christian nation run according to their interpretation of scripture. In her examination of the ever-widening divide between believers and nonbelievers, Goldberg illustrates the subversive effect of this conservative stranglehold nationwide. In an age when faith rather than reason is heralded and the values of the Enlightenment are threatened by a mystical nationalism claiming divine sanction, Kingdom Coming brings us face to face with the irrational forces that are remaking much of America.”

We are living in truly dangerous times when bible thumpers have stolen the key to the White-house.

Read it and weep.