Andrew Sullivan revisits the Deal with Christianists.

In May of 2006, Andrew Sullivan coined the term and concept of "christianist" in his Time Magazine article "My Problem with Christianism." (read it here.)

Since then, it has been a topic he has revisited in his own column, The Dish.

Since The Democrat Deal started in February of 2010, we have written extensively on the subject, frequently bringing Mr. Sullivan's lucid observations with us into the fray.

With Rick Perry's entrance into the GOP fray, yesterday, The Dish catches us up to speed.

The Deal would only venture to add that while the Christianist movement has had an impact on the whole of the country, the only "takeover" accorded it is within the ranks of the Tea Party-controlled GOP. This political marriage (with the Tea Party/Christianists forming the male figure and the rest of the GOP playing the subservient wife) is, at best, a rocky one. The Tea Party is feuding among it's own. The GOP is increasingly transparent in it's declining valuation of the radical right. The upcoming election is already being seen as one where losses are expected among it's ranks.

But - there is still plenty of political fuel to be fired. For that, there is no one better than the Gov. of Texas. It is an obvious career choice. Rick Perry should be able to suck all the air out of Bachmann and Palin while sweeping the floor with Romney, succeeding whether he wins or loses. (take it easy, he will surely lose the general, should he get there.)

Perry will, undoubtedly, succeed at increasing his own number of zealots, sheep, and career options for a former Gov of Texas. It is a tough job to follow. Ask anyone.

The Christianist Takeover
by Andrew Sullivan
c/o The Dish

It now appears to be complete. When I wrote "The Conservative Soul," David Brooks was underwhelmed by its core argument: that an accelerating shift was taking place in American conservatism that was transforming the small government secular temperament into a fundamentalist religious mindset that sought its refuge not in doubting humankind's capacity for good, but in believing in God's ability to heal all things, including politics.

David argued that the religious and fundamentalist shift in the GOP was over-rated, and that there was no conflict between evangelicalism and mainstream American values.

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

Well, a few years later, examine the candidacies of the two front-runners for the GOP. One launched his campaign in a revival meeting calling for God to solve our economic problems (having previously led mass prayers for the end of the Texas drought); the other emerges entirely out of Dominionist theology and built her entire career in the Christianist world of home-schooling, and anti-gay demonization. One reason Mitt Romney is not a shoo-in? Sectarianism, and his own previous deviations from binding orthodoxy. And it is this fundamentalist mindset - in which nothing doctrinal can be questioned, and the real world must be bent to the shape of a rigid theo-ideology - that defines these two candidates.

Hence Bachmann's belief that the entire deficit can be ended in short shrift solely by massive cuts in spending. This "spending alone" principle cannot be compromised, since taxation in and of itself is a way in which the liberal elites control people's lives. It doesn't matter what economists say about the consequence of wilful default or of austerity too sharply imposed. It only matters what God says. And God is bound up with a radical American theology in which slavery was more benign than the Great Society, and that the Founders were abolitionists. That American theology creates the justification for the use of American military power across the globe, especially in protecting and advancing Greater Israel, Bachmann's and Perry's fundamentalist cause of causes.

This is what this party now is: a religious movement clothed in anti-government radicalism. It has nothing to do with the conservative temperament, conservative political thought or conservative ideas. It is hostile to most existing institutions, especially government, contemptuous of the courts, and seized of an ideology as rigid as any far-left liberalism, as utopian as any wide-eyed socialist, as fanatical as anything the left spawned in the 1960s.

And it has hijacked an entire political party; and recently held to ransom an entire country. I knew it would get worse before it gets better. But this bad?

[Yes, Mr. Sullivan "this bad." The phoenix must burn to ash before it can take to the skies. ed.]

For the original article, go here.

What's the deal with democrat zietgiest? The incomparible Ms. Dowd knows das Geschäft.

"He doesn’t like the bully pulpit, just the professor’s lectern," states our friend and colleague at the NYT, as usual, simply, cogently, putting context to a dominant perplexing national conundrum. In stark contrast to the candidate Obama many of us (myself, very much included) were pied pipers and delighted to be part of such an exciting, promising moment in our national history.

Three years later, little remains of either the enthusiasm or promise. The only "change" President Obama has materialized is the change in his direction and our expectations. The Chicago pol who referred to himself as a "fierce advocate" during he campaign has yet to show a hint of either fierceness or advocacy. What his increasingly hard-pressed cheerleaders like Plouffe and Axelrod point to as crowing achievements to his administration are most often times the President has stepped out of the way and not been an impediment to legislation (though not beyond accepting credit, post-facto, i.e. healthcare "reform" and repealing of DADT and DOMA.) Another great example and defining metaphor to his leadership (or lack, thereof), can be found surrounding those infamous robber-baron Bush (née Obama) era tax cuts Candidate Obama aggressively built a consensus and candidacy around. Since taking office, he has, without a sideways glance, voted to extend these cuts amidst intense economic argument against such action and, then, seamlessly extoll their inherent injustice on the perpetual campaign for re-election.

Ahh, the capacity of the political animal. But is Obama truly a political animal? Not in a Clinton, "against all odds and challenges who sucks the air out of any room he enters" kind of way. Not in the Johnson, hard-assed "comin' up to the hill to cajoll or strong-arm members to his view" kind of way. And Certainly not in the FDR "we are better than our obstacles, here's our historic plans to deal with historic challenges" kind of way.

Obama has a perfectly brilliant American narrative, to be sure. Political strategists wait their whole career for such an engaging backdrop to a campaign. Yet, his lack of application, his reluctance to expend his (once) political capital, his absence in any significant consensus-building or public initiative leadership to date cannot but highlight the fact that this compelling human narrative may be little more than that - a narrative that captures our collective imagination, our "hope," but does not then translate into any evidence for the capacity to manifest "change" or even produce the most meager of "back-stops" against a Congress where the culture of intransigency has sunk to parody as the Teabag tail wags the GOP dog.

To the realists of the left, this dynamic has been dismally clear for some time. To all but the most ardent and centrist of the president's flock, the maintenance of denial is visibly crumbling day by day.
For Plouffe and Axelrod, this isn't an issue. Primarily, because it is one they cannot effect. They cannot pull Candidate Obama out of the closet and replace the defining national political disappointment of a generation with the hopeful and uplifting Chicagoan of pre-2009. All his advisor's need to do (in their relatively public opinion) is wait for the coming Perry/Romney battle where Perry holds the odds to carry the primary but also provide the face to the final heydays of a tea-party that will burn itself down from the inside by the general, allowing for four more years of the more moderate republican Obama administration.

The question of import now is - since the candidate of "yes, we can," is the president of "but, we won't try," where do we stand as a party and a country? More importantly, where do we go from here? What, and for whom, must we fight for?

Ms. Dowd, illuminates, c/o NYT:

Withholder in Chief
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 9, 2011

Even the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair is not enough to sweeten the mood.

Three years ago, Barack Obama’s unlikely presidential dream was given wings by rapturous Iowans — young, old and in-between — who saw in the fresh-faced, silky-voiced black senator a chance to leap past the bellicose, rancorous Bush years into a modern, competitive future where we once more had luster in the world.

“We are choosing hope over fear,” Senator Obama told a delirious crowd of 3,000 here the night he won the Iowa caucuses.

But fear has garroted hope, as America reels from the latest humiliating blows on the economy and in Afghanistan. The politician who came across as a redeemer in 2008 is now in need of redemption himself.

Faced with a country keening for reassurance and reinvention, Obama seems at a loss. Regarding his political skills, he turns out to be the odd case of a pragmatist who can’t learn from his mistakes and adapt.

Many of his Democratic supporters here, who once waited hours in line just to catch a glimpse of The One, are disillusioned.

“We just wish he’d be more of a fighter,” said one influential Democrat with a grimace. Another agreed: “You can’t blame him for everything. I just wish he would come across more forceful at times, but that is not the dude’s style. Detached hurts you when things are sour. You need some of Clinton’s ‘I feel your pain’ compassion.”

The president has been so spectacularly unable to fill the leadership void in Washington that the high-spirited Michele Bachmann feels free to purloin Obama’s old mantra.

“The power behind our campaign is hope and a future,” she chirped to a sparse crowd Monday in Atlantic, Iowa. “That’s all I believe in.” That and making America safe for old-fashioned light bulbs and not those weird curly ones.

Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security, and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course.

Bachmann has been riding around Iowa in her bus, with Elvis music and her name emblazoned 25 times on the outside, mocking Obama for going to Camp David last weekend and burrowing in, while the country was roiling.


His inability to grab a microphone and spontaneously assuage Americans’ fears is strange. If the American servicemen had died on a Monday, he wouldn’t have waited until Wednesday to talk about it. He doesn’t like the bully pulpit, just the professor’s lectern.

After failing to interrupt his Camp David weekend to buck up the country on one of its worst days in history, he tacked on his condolences for the soldiers’ families to his economic pep talk, in what had to be the most inept oratorical segue of his presidency.

He long ago should have gone out into the country to talk to Americans in person and come up with a concrete plan that people could print out from the White House Web site and study. Hasn’t he learned how dangerous it is to delegate to Congress? His withholding and reactive nature has made him seem strangely irrelevant in Washington, trapped by his own temperament. He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led.

Speaking from the State Dining Room of the White House, he advised America it was still “a triple-A country” like some cerebral soccer coach urging the kids to win one for the London Interbank Offered Rate.

With traders hearing nothing new, just boilerplate about “common sense and compromise” on deficit reduction, the Dow Jones industrial average, which had already fallen 410 points, fell 20 more points while the president was talking around 2 o’clock. By the 4 p.m. close, the Dow was 634 points lower.
Obama has spent a lifetime creating his persona — superior, wise, above all parties and interests, all-seeing, calm, unflappable.

But as Drew Westen, a liberal psychology professor at Emory University wrote in The Times on Sunday, puzzling about what has happened to his former hero’s passion, the president never identifies the villains who cause our epic problems.

It’s unclear, Westen wrote, whether that reflects his aversion to conflict or a fear of offending donors, or both.

Obama’s assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe. And it has led to Americans regarding the nation’s capital as a place of all villains and no heroes.

for the orginal article go here.

Michelle Bachmann Doesn't Need a Flaming Husband to Burn Down Her Campaign...

..she'll do it just fine on her own.

Granted, the article below is just a collection of observations by various people and one's sexuality is solely one's own business. However, when one is the vociferously anti-gay husband (who appears very gay) of the vociferously anti-gay presidential candidate, Michelle Bachmann, it is the cruel hypocrisy at issue, not the sexuality itself.

As with Sarah Palin on John McCain's ticket, Ms. Bachmann's ability to lessen her chances with all but the right-wing fringe voters is exercised every time she opens her mouth to speak something other than a rehearsed talking point. The only question is when she will crest in terms of popularity and nose-dive her own campaign. Fellow candidate Mitt Romney is hoping for later rather than sooner. Bachmann is, according to Romney insiders, god's gift to the Romney campaign.

The Minnesota Congresswoman doesn't need a closeted husband who happens to be a homophobic "Christian" counselor to "former" gay men to bring down her campaign. Though with the increasing media exposure of Marcus Bachmann and his explicitly hypocritical and exuberantly angry stance towards homosexuality, it could certainly add fuel to the fire.

fabulousss marcus bachmann c/o getty images

This article comes to us c/o Laurie Apple at Gawker.com:

All Kinds of People Weighing in on Marcus ‘Mr. Michele’ Bachmann’s Sexuality
Lauri Apple —Since Tea Partying hostess-with-the-mostest Rep. Michele Bachmann declared her presidential candidacy, Dr. Marcus Bachmann—her gay-barbarian discipline-advocating therapist-husband—has been drawing heightened attention on his own. Some people, including famous-type ones, think maybe Bachmann's a gay barbarian as well.

Notable Bachmann sexuality commentators include:

• Cher, who used her Twitter the other day to riff on Bachmann (as the gay news website Towleroad noticed).
• Pundit Andrew Sullivan, who called Bachmann a "ssuper-sserial hunter of gays" and then compared him to Waiting for Guffman character Corky St. Clair.
• The Daily Show co-creator and satirist Lizz Winstead, who tweeted that Bachmann is "the white Al Reynolds."
• James Urbaniak of The Venture Brothers, who Tumbled: "It's pretty much a given that the most vociferously homophobic men are usually repressing something. But, oh Mary, Michele Bachmann's husband Marcus takes the ever-loving cake. He's a cure-the-gay therapist out of a John Waters movie. I haven't seen flames this high since the last California wildfire..."
• Kids in the Hall comic and television actor Dave Foley, who asked via Twitter: "How can Michele Bachman be opposed to gay marriage when she is married to gay man." Foley made a few other tweets about Bachmann, using "#MarcusBachmanIsSoGay"; the hashtag got a bit of traction.
• Keith Olbermann referred to Bachmann as a "bizarre-sounding man who's calling gays 'barbarians'" and wonders how you can "hide" him without putting him in some sort of closet.

Also, someone has created a @DrMarcusBachman Twitter feed. And at least one blogger believes Bachmann would make a "fine First Lady of the United States."
People started questioning Bachmann's sexuality well before his wife announced her presidential campaign. Back in September 2010, for example, Truth Wins Out—a nonprofit whose mission is to fight "anti-gay religious extremism"—posted on its website a YouTube of Bachmann with the comment, "Comment not necessary." That vid got people talking, but not at the level we're now seeing. Will his sexuality become a bigger issue as Mrs. B's campaign churns along? We'll see.
At this point, you might be wondering whether all these jokes and comments amount to gay-bashing. Wisconsin Gazette blogger Louis Weisberg took up that very question in a summary of all the Bachmann chatter. His conclusion?:

As long as the Bachmanns continue to display traits that seem to be at odds with their positions on the issues, they're sure to inspire more ridicule. Whether that ridicule is justified or unseemly is a debate within itself.

In addition to promoting the cause of gay discipline, Bachmann has also donated to a group that's trying to ban gay marriage in Minnesota. He might want to stop that kind of thing, if he wants celebrities and others to stop tweeting about him so much.