Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Subpenas of emails from Jack Abramhoff reveal the following exchange from Michael Scanlon, former Tom DeLay aide

Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

Here he is calling the Republican core constituency "Whackos".

Most reading this here would probably agree. They are plain old nuts on so many levels - from creationism in schools to Terri Schiavo and everything else in between.

But i would contend what makes them the most whacky is their long term affiliation with the Republican party - a party which clearly, as Scanlon refers to, uses them for their own political objectives. Their objectives mostly handing over the wealth of our nation from the working people of America to big bidness and the rich elite fat cats.

Consider that the Supreme court is loaded with GOP appointed justices yet Roe still stands. That the congress is wholly controlled by the Republican political machine yet little if any of the cultural hot button issues are ever truly addressed.

The nomination of a stealth Justices like Roberts must have been bad enough, but the real slap came when Bush nominated Meirs.

One has to wonder how stupid you have to be before you realize you are being pandered to and used, as bills like this one hurt them more than any gay person holding hands in public.

How does this happen ? Again Scanlon gives us a clue.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees,"

If you have ever turned on TeeVee on a Sunday and flipped through the channels you will no doubt fleetingly skip past religious programming. If you ever stop to dwell on any of these channel it would be hard to discriminate between a mega church sermon and an RNC convention. The political rhetoric is literally dripping from these sermons - all emotionally intertwined with biblical references. These people are a people under cultural seige, whose only saviour is the Republican party and conservative judges or so the sermons go.

It is the leaders of these churches, from people like Ralph Reed (who is all tied up with Abrahmoff) to Rod Parsely in Ohio who provide the real grass roots power to the Republicans - they aren't preachers they are simply political operatives.

Exposing these people to the religious right followers should be a matter of urgency - emailing Scanlons comments to religious right "whackos" might not be a bad place to start.