Andrew Jackson blasphemed (in an otherwise good post)

The post is question is:  Warriors and Warrior Wannabes Sic Semper Tyrannis blog 07/02/06.  It's one of Pat Lang's commenters, whose comment he elevated to a separate post.  Lang is distinguishing between the real professional warrior and the Warrior, i.e., the blowhard white-guy "look-how-tough-I-can-talk-about-someone-else-killing-people" type.

Lang describes the lower-case "warriors" as:

... people for whom war is a trade, a way of life suited to their nature, a nature that is restless in civil society.  For them there is a certain disinterest in the concerns of civilians, a preference for a kind of "monasticism" unlimited by the strictures of Benedict's Rule or any other "Rule" unconnected with their often unexpressed and often inexpressible code of behavior.  I imagine this Venetian soldier to be one such.  Such people are not a problem for civilians because they do not seek a close interaction with civilians and prefer to live among their own kind waiting for the bugle's call.  Even in retirement they tend to keep to themselves and live apart.  In combat units people like this are the natural leaders and "reference points for emulation" no matter what their rank.  If you are not a veteran or not from a military background, then you may not know anyone of this breed.  They do not seek you out.

His commenter describes the blowhard "Warrior" this way:

The Warrior is emotionally suited to pitched, Pattonesque battles of moral clarity and simple intent. I don’t mean that he is stupid.... Yet emotionally the Warrior has the uncomplicated instincts of a pit bull. Intensely loyal to friends and intensely hostile to the enemy, he doesn’t want any confusion as to which is which. His tolerance for ambiguity is very low. He wants to close with the enemy and destroy him.... This works in wars like WWII.... It does not work when winning requires the support of the population. The Warrior, unable to see things through the eyes of the enemy, or of the local population, whom he quickly comes to hate, wants to blow hell out of things. He detests all that therapeutic crap, that touchy-feely leftist stuff about respect the population, especially the women. Having the empathy of an engine block, he regards mention of mutilated children as intensely annoying at best, and communist propaganda at worst.

On the net these men sometimes speak approvingly to each other of the massacre at My Lai. Hey, they were all Cong. If they weren’t, they knew who the Cong were and didn’t tell us. Calley did the right thing, taught them a lesson. There is an admiration of Calley for having avoided bureaucratic rules of engagement probably dreamed up by civilians. War is war. You kill people. Deal with it.

That's such a great description of this type.  My beef with it is that he describes such characters as (gasp! choke!) "Jacksonians"!

Oh, the horror, the horror.  Let's be generous and assume his was misled by Walter Russel Mead, as I shred my garments here:

The problem is this peculiar gung-ho mindset that knows only us and them-who-are-against-us. Walter Russel Mead [] dubbed them the Jacksonians.

It's true.  Mead should have to endure some punishment for that.  Like be required to read aloud the entire text of John C. Calhoun's Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States.  I've read the thing.  Believe me, that would be real punishment.

Lang's commenter adds on the Warrior:

However, the Warrior does not grant the public the right to grow weary. For him, America exists to support the military, not the other way around. Are two hundred dead a week coming back from Asia? The Warrior believes that small-town America (which is where the coffins usually go) should grit its teeth, bear down, and make the sacrifice for the country. Sacrifice for what? It doesn’t matter. We’re at war, dammit. Rally ‘round. What are you, a commy?

You know, that kind of reminds me of Chuckie.

Tags: andrew jackson

John Tierney and the Confederacy

Billmon has been on a roll posting provocative stuff lately.  I want to mention this one The Totalitarian Temptation 07/02/06 as well worth reading and I plan to comment on it more later.

But first I want to mention his response to a New York Times column by John Tierney, where he speculates whether it might not have worked out better if the Confederacy had succeeded in making a separate nation:  A House Divided 07/04/06.  Billmon and Steve Gilliard go into several of the things  wrong with Tierney's column (Idiocy in action 07/04/06).

But neither of them points out clearly that this is one variety of neo-Confederate fantasy.  And if we're going to talk counterfactual history, let's at least rely on what the real situation tells us so far as we can.

There was no way the Confederacy and a United States of the Union states were going to coexist.  On the military and economic front, the CSA would have controlled the Mississippi River, which was the main source for trade in the (then-)western states.  They would have been pressured to join the CSA or face economic strangulation.

And it was the slavery issue (in any honest account) that tore the country apart.  Or, more precisely, that led the Southern "Fire-Eaters" to push for secession.  If they were that upset about having free states being potential avenues of escape for their slaves, what would they have done if the free states became a separate country?  At a minimum, they would have insisted on a treaty as strict as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 if not more so, and just as intrusive of the internal affairs of the United States and its individual states.

Unless the remaining United States was willing to live on their knees to the slaveholding Confederacy, it never would have worked.  The CSA would have absorbed all or most of the Union states and made them into slave states.  Or tried.

Iraq War: Victory after victory after victory...

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

President Bush for the Fourth of July went down to Fort Bragg NC for a speech and photo-op of his favorite kind, surrounded by uniformed soldiers who don't have the choice to be there and who are not allowed to boo him or ask hostile questions.

But he had lots of that good news that FOX News keeps telling us about:

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to visit Baghdad and visit with some of Fort Bragg's finest soldiers, the special operation forces who helped bring justice to the terrorist Zarqawi. (Applause.) ...

We're on the offense. In the weeks since Zarqawi's death, coalition and Iraqi forces have launched more than 190 raids on targets across the country. We've captured more than 700 enemy operatives and killed some 60 more. In these raids, we've uncovered caches of weapons and suicide vests and Iraqi army uniforms to be used as disguises in brutal terrorist attacks. We've seized new intelligence information that is helping us keep the pressure on the terrorists and the insurgents. And at this moment of vulnerability for the enemy, we will continue to strike their network, we will disrupt their operations, and we will bring their leaders to justice. (Applause.)

Last week, Iraqi security forces announced the capture of an al Qaeda terrorist from Tunisia named Abu Qadama. He's one of the men responsible for the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara. The Golden Mosque is one of Shia Islam's holiest sites, and the terrorists blew it up in the hope that this vicious act would provoke sectarian reprisals and drag the nation into civil war, and derail the formation of the unity government. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in the violence that ensued.

But in the end, Iraqis stepped back from the abyss. They want to live in a free and peaceful society. Their mothers are no different from the mothers here in America who want their children to grow up and be able to realize dreams. They came together to form a new government. Iraqi and coalition forces working together have brought justice to a key player in the Samara attack. We're going to continue to strike blows against the terrorists. We'll continue working to support Iraq's new government.

 When I spoke here a year ago, Iraqis still had a transitional government that was operating under administrative law issued before the restoration of sovereignty. Today, Iraqis have a permanent government chosen in free elections under a democratic constitution that they wrote and they approved. And the Iraqi people have a courageous leader in Prime Minister Maliki, who has formed the cabinet and laid out a clear agenda for the people of Iraq.

I met the Prime Minister. I met with his team. I was impressed by them. I was impressed by his strength. I was impressed by his character. I was impressed by his determination to succeed. He's laid out an ambitious plan to improve its economy and deliver essential services and to defeat the enemies of a free Iraq. And I told him this, that as he stands up for freedom, the United States of America will stand with him

Man, that's great!  We're just crushing The Terrorists all over the place.  And the civil war is over.  The Big Terrorist Mastermind in Iraq, Zarqawi, is dead.  Everything is coming up roses.

Sounds like "Mission Accomplished" to me!

All troops home by Christmas?

No, it doesn't sound like it.  Bush is sticking with the Republican Party position on the Iraq War for the 2006 Congressional election campaigns:  More Of The Same.  The theory seems to be that if three-plus years of winning has been so great, another three years or more of winning will be even better.

At least he didn't say anything about attacking Iran and thereby turning our unbroken string of successes in Iraq to a regional war where we can have even more successes.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05

Iran War: Is Israel shifting its position on war with Iran?

"God may smile on us, but I don't think so." - anonymous Pentagon adviser quoted by Seymour Hersh April 2006 on Bush administration plans to pressure Iran militarily

The following article is an illustration of one major reason why I'm so suspicious of theories that represent Israel's influence on American foreign policy as consistently pernicious.  If the analysis in this article is correct, Israel may be exerting what I would consider to be a constructive influence on American policy toward Iran:  Israel Fears High Price for U.S. Strike on Iran by Trita Parsi, Inter Press Service 07/05/06.

Parsi argues that the Israeli government has seriously reassessed the risks to themselves of the regional war that an American attack on Iran would almost certainly generate, compared to the risk from Iran's nuclear program:

According to Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution, the Israelis "assume they'll be struck first in retaliation by Iran." In fact, a top Revolutionary Guards commander, Gen. Mohammad Dehghani, said as much to the Iranian Student News Agency earlier in May. "We have announced that wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel," he said.

By threatening retaliation against Israel, Iran increases the cost of Israel's pressure on the U.S. while framing the conflict as a U.S.-Israeli aggression against an Islamic state by dragging the Jewish State into the fighting.  ...

Israel does not take these Iranian warnings lightly. According to Israel's own intelligence, Iranian capabilities in Lebanon via the Hezbollah are considerable and the Iranian presence in the Palestinian territories has increased significantly over the last few years. Though Iran's military is unlikely to pose a major challenge to Israel, its unconventional capabilities can still cause much damage to an already war-weary Israeli population.

Parsi also writes of the effects of the disaster known as the Iraq War on Ehud Olmert's government's evaluation of the military and political situation in the Middle East:

As the Iranian nuclear stand-off has taken its turns and twists, the initial Israeli calculation of either forcing an Iranian capitulation through U.S. political and economic pressure, or -- if worse came to worst -- by eliminating the programme through clean and surgical military strikes, have all proven to be pipe-dreams, primarily due to the disastrous consequences of the Iraq war.  ...

In addition, the Iraq experience has shown that no "clean and surgical" military option exists. Even though the military dimension itself may not be too complex, Washington is poorly placed to deal with the political aftermath in the region. Rather, increasing the pressure on Iran is more likely to lead to a prolonged and bloody conflict that may very well engulf the entire region -- including Israel.

This was one thing that opponents of the Iraq War prior to Bush's 2003 invasion pointed out again and again.  Of Bush's "axis of evil", both North Korea and Iran had much more active nuclear programs than Iraq.  Iran was also generally recognized as the chief "state sponsor" of international terrorism, although most of it was directly against Israel, and little or none against the United States.

But Bush and Cheney and Rummy went after what they thought would be easy pickings in Iraq.  And now their options in dealing with Iran are far more restricted, not enhanced.

And Parsi reminds us once again that the famous/infamous American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Israeli goveernment or of American Jews on particular issues:

Israel's strategic reassessment may not yet have affected all of Israel's strong supporters in Washington, even though Olmert privately asked Jewish groups to lower their profile on the issue. The American-Israel [Public] Affairs Committee, for instance, remains at the forefront of pushing for the Iran Freedom Support Act in the U.S. Senate, which risks sabotaging the sensitive negotiations with Iran even before they begin, according to administration officials.

Still, rumblings in the U.S. Jewish community reveal that Olmert's message largely fell on receptive ears. As the unpopularity of the Iraq war has peaked, many in the Jewish community fear that the U.S. public will turn their anger towards Israel. Perceptions of close ties between Bush administration neoconservatives and the Israeli Likud party,as well as Israel's support for the Iraq war, fuel these fears and render a tough stance on Iran even more difficult.

Jewish organisations have no interest in becoming "the lobby for war with Iran", one official told the Forward earlier in June.

And even though the Bush administration was rigidly "pro-Israel" during Sharon's tenure as prime minister, that doesn't mean that the Israeli government urging restraint will necessarily sway the administration's decision-making.  The anti-Iran rhetoric from the Bush administration has also been ratcheted down recently.  But, as we know from 2002, they don't consider summer to be the best time to roll out "new products", e.g., attacking Iran and expanding the Iraq War into a regional war.

Israel is a factor in US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East.  That in itself is neither good nor bad; it depends on the effects.  I would argue that the Bush administration was far too cooperative with the Sharon government, and even now too passive about Israel's lastest military strikes against the Palestinians.  But Israel's influence is not always sinister nor always benign.  Conspiracy theories that assume otherwise are going to miss some of what's really going on.

Bush and the Plame leak

Murray Waas has new information on the Plame leak investigation:  Bush Directed Cheney To Counter War Critic National Journal 07/03/06.  According to Waas' report, Bush told the federal prosecutors that he had directed Dick Cheney to head up the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson, which eventually led to the outing of Plame as an undercover CIA operative.

This is not a "smoking gun" tying Bush directly to illegal actions.  But it emphasizes yet again that he was dissembling when he was answering questions in public on the leak investigation when it first got underway.  Waas writes:

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between Bush and Cheney - but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's interview with prosecutors - said that Bush told the vice president to "Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and would discredit him.

A person with direct knowledge of Bush's interview refused to confirm that Bush used those words, but said that the first official's account was generally consistent with what Bush had told Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

Libby, in language strikingly similar to Bush's words, testified to the federal grand jury in the leak case that Cheney had told him to "get all the facts out" that would defend the administration and discredit Wilson. Portions of Libby's grand jury testimony were an exhibit in a recent court filing by Fitzgerald.

But let's assume for a moment that Bush didn't intend for any illegal actions to be taken in pursuit of this goal.  We shouldn't lose sight of the war issue here.  Murray writes:

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

Joe Wilson had reported his findings on the reports suggesting that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium in Niger.  Obviously, Bush would want to "defend his administration".  But according to this, he wanted to "not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson".

But Wilson's report came to the correct conclusion.  Wilson provided more truthful information in his report than Ahmad Chalabi and his fellow scammers were manufacturing and feeding to the bureaucratic lie factories that Rummy and Cheney had set up in their respective offices.  It shows, at the very best, how very little Bush cared about whether he had taken the country to war based on fraudulent information.

Waas also reminds us of this:

A senior government official who has spoken to the president about the matter said that although Bush encouraged Cheney to get information out to rebut Wilson's charges, Bush was unaware that Cheney had directed Libby to leak classified information. The White House has pointed out that the president and vice president have broad executive powers to declassify whatever information they believe to be in the public interest. Meanwhile, court papers filed by Fitzgerald in April suggest that Libby was reluctant to leak any classified information to the press, and only did so after being assured that his actions were approved by both the president and vice president.

Regarding a meeting with Judith Miller that was scheduled for July 8, 2003, in which Cheney wanted Libby to leak her portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, Fitzgerald asserted in the court papers that Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized in advance of the meeting to disclose... [portions] of the classified NIE to Miller on that occasion."

"[Libby] further testified that he at first advised the Vice President that he could not have this conversation with reporter Miller because of the classified nature of the NIE. [Libby] testified that the Vice President later advised him that the President had authorized [Libby] to disclose the relevant portions of the NIE."

Christy Hardin Smith of FireDogLake has commented on the new Waas article: Well, Lookee Here… 07/04/06.  She writes on the timing of events discussed in Waas' article:

Coincidence? I think not. And if you think that this group of Machiavellian back-alley revenge masters would stick firmly to the "rebuttal on the facts" when they held a trump card of not only attempting to shut Ambassador Wilson up, but intimidating other critics who might also step forward, you can think again. Family has always - ALWAYS - been off limits, especially family that happens to be working for the CIA in a sensitive nuclear and other WMDs arena which is vital to national security interests for the nation at the moment.

But in this case, none of that mattered because Dick Cheney’s credibility had been questioned, the old bull saw red, and all bets were off. That sonofabitch Wilson was going to pay. (Can’t you just hear it coming out of old Mr. GFY’s mouth?)

Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah is also scrutinizing the new Waas report.  In Protecting Dick and Bush? 07/03/06, he writes:

All of which suggests that the underlying story of this Waas pieces is that Libby has claimed Bush was involved in authorizing his activities from that week. And Bush has denied part of Libby's claim.

Which all of a sudden puts some distance between OVP and WH on the Plame Affair. Dick, Addington, and Libby carried out their little insta-declassification. While WH carried out a smear the old-fashioned way, by really declassifying something first, then leaking it. (It's unclear whether the distance is real, or whether it's a nice fiction invented by all involved to protect the President.)

Now, as I suggested above, I'm not sure I buy it, mostly because I find it hard to believe that WH didn't know that Libby and Dick (and Bolton and Feith and so on and so on) had long insta-declassified things and laundered it through Judy or some other credulous reporter. That is, leaking something classified to journalists was a regular habit of the Neocon cabal's, and I really doubt that Bush knew nothing about it.

The 2006 Republican campaign: terror, terror, terror

Doyle McManus and Peter Wallsten report GOP Aims to Use a War to Win an Election Battle: Republicans are once again making the fight against terrorism a campaign cornerstone. So far, Democrats have not been as engaging Los Angeles Times 07/02/06

The headline writer could also have written "Mainstream media lets Republicans claim just about anything without seriously challenging them".  But, then, that wouldn't really be news, would it?

They report:

President Bush says Democrats want to "wave the white flag of surrender" in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney accuses the opposition party's leaders of "defeatism" in the global war on terrorism. And House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio charges Democrats who applauded last week's Supreme Court ruling on detainees with advocating "special privileges for terrorists."

And, in the standard conduct for the Establishment press, they go along with the imaginative Republican spin on even Bush's defeat before the Supreme Court last week on military tribunals:

"The Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo was a real blessing in disguise," said Whit Ayres, another GOP pollster. It "allows us to have a debate on whether terrorists should receive the same legal protections as American military personnel…. It's hard to see Republicans losing when that's the debate."

Democratic leaders say, at least in public, that they are confident they can win that debate.

But the Democrats' response so far has been less unified, less pointed and less memorable than the Republicans' attacks.

As in Churchill's famous saying, if it's a blessing for the Reps, it must be well-disguised.  But that doesn't stop our "press corps" from typing up the Republican talking points.

But as the Republican rhetoric gets nastier, the press faithfully reports the this-side-says/the-other-side-says story.  So sleaze like this becomes part of "mainstream" political conversation - at least for the "press corps", for whom whatever the Republican Party says becomes "mainstream":

At a fundraising event last week for Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.), Bush said: "There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off."

And after Thursday's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo, House Majority Leader Boehner went a step further, accusing his Democratic counterparts of giving Al Qaeda "a show of support" by praising the court ruling.

A statement released by Boehner's office was headlined, "Capitol Hill Democrats Advocate Special Privileges for Terrorists." It noted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) had applauded the court's ruling that alleged terrorists were entitled to "the basic guarantees of our justice system." The statement also said that Al Qaeda was "surely pleased at the show of support from Capitol Hill Democrats."

I wonder if the Establishment press will both to report things like this:  The Terrorism Index by Foreign Policy magazine & The Center For American Progress, Foreign Policy July/Aug 2006.  The report says:

Despite today’s highly politicized national security environment, the index results show striking consensus across political party lines. A bipartisan majority (84 percent) of the index’s experts say the United States is not winning the war on terror. Eighty-six percent of the index’s experts see a world today that is growing more dangerous for Americans. Overall, they agree that the U.S. government is falling short in its homeland security efforts. More than 8 in 10 expect an attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade. These dark conclusions appear to stem from the experts’ belief that the U.S. national security apparatus is in serious disrepair. “Foreign-policy experts have never been in so much agreement about an administration’s performance abroad,” says Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and an index participant. “The reason is that it’s clear to nearly all that Bush and his team have had a totally unrealistic view of what they can accomplish with military force and threats of force.”

Bob McElvaine on why Mad Annie Coulter hates Jesus and opposes Christianity

The following column is found at Martin Marty's Sightings Web site.  It's accompanied by the notice "Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School."

So I'm including the entire text below.  All emphases are in the original.

**********

Jesusless: The Church of Conservatism

by Robert S. McElvaine 06/30/06

In Godless, her latest and most ill-tempered book-length rant, Ann Coulter asserts that liberalism is a “godless” religion.  In fact, however, the most fundamental problem in Christianity in America and the world today is that the “fundamentalist” religion that most loudly proclaims itself to be “Christian” is Jesusless.

Coulter demonstrates how Jesusless she and her cohort who have co-opted the name of Christianity are when she identifies "Americans' Christian destiny" as "jet skis, steak on the electric grill, hot showers, and night skiing."  For some reason, she fails to cite her source in the Gospels for her definition of Christian destiny, which amounts to: Jesus died for our jet skis.

Read the Gospels from beginning to end and nowhere will you find Jesus suggesting anything like what Coulter sees as the destiny of Christians.  Quite the contrary.  Indeed, there is no source in anything Jesus said for most of what the best-known “Christians” preach in his name these days.  While Coulter fumes that “liberalism is the opposition party to God,” the clear truth is that what passes for “Christianity” today is the opposition party to Jesus.  She attacks “the liberal hostility to God-based religions” while exposing her own hostility to Jesus-based religion.

As has been widely reported, Coulter offers “Christian” sentiments about widows of 9/11 victims who are not on her side politically: “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis,” the millionaire TV celebrity and right-wing lioness Coulter hisses.  “I've never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”  If Jesus had remained in his grave, surely he would be spinning in it to hear such evil venom being spit out in his name.

“Christians” of the sort who buy Coulter’s books call themselves “fundamentalists,” but their emphasis is entirely upon the word’s first syllable; they’re all about having fun. But when it comes to the fundamental teachings of Jesus, they take a pass.  Turn the other cheek?  Self-sacrifice?  Help the poor?  Nonviolence?  That stuff's too hard.  They replace the Gospel accounts of what Jesus said with the Gospel according to John and Paul (Lennon and McCartney, that is): “Give me money / That’s what I want.”

The Church of Coulter - and that of the loudest “Christians” today - should be called what it plainly is: Jesusless: The Church of Mammon.  Coulter makes millions by calling others treasonous and Godless and saying, “We should invade [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”  Conversion should start at home, and Coulter first needs to convert herself from Mammonism to Christianity.

Like many others in the increasingly dominant and totally misnamed “Christian Right,” Coulter has a persecution complex.  Upon the publication of Godless, she used her syndicated column to write a self-review of her book, saying it would be ignored: “If you find Godless without asking for assistance, it’s considered a minor miracle.”  This from a woman whose new Jesusless book was at that very moment rising to Number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list.  (That such a patently anti-Jesus book could become the best-selling book in America tells us just how far removed from being followers of Christ most of today’s self-proclaimed Christians are.)  She’s lamenting all the way to the bank, her house of worship.

In my opinion, those who complain about a “War on Christianity” are right.  The generals conducting that war include, in addition to Kill-a-Muslim-for-Christ Coulter, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, and the whole Unheavenly Host of televangelists and megachurch moneychangers and wolves in sheep’s clothing who have expropriated the moral assets of Jesus and turned them to their own purposes.  They never met a dollar they didn’t like.  They prefer profits to prophecy and pretend that Jesus did, too.  They favor the rich over the poor and invert Jesus to contend that he did, too.  They favor war over peace and lie by saying that Jesus did, too.

Coulter and millions of her fellow adherents to ChristianityLite - a“religion” that is the equivalent of a “Lose weight without diet or exercise” scam (“Easy Jesus! Be saved without sacrifice or good works!”) - have aborted Jesus and rewritten his teachings to suit their own selfish desires.  Their revision of the Beatitudes - what we might call the Be-Ann-itudes - goes something like this:

Blessed are the haughty in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who exult over others, for they shall be further rewarded.
Blessed are the arrogant, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for domination, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are those who show no mercy, for they shall obtain the wealth of others.
Blessed are the hard in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who persecute for their own sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when you revile others and persecute others and utter all sorts of evil against them falsely on my account.

Onward Jesusless “Christian” soldiers, marching others into war.

Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College and is the author of Eve's Seed (McGraw-Hill) (http://evesseed.net). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled ChristianityLite: Getting to Heaven without the Hassle.