The revelations of conservative Christian David Kuo, detailed in his new book
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction, that Karl Rove and the political operatives of the Republican Party's inner sanctum have been playing simple-minded religious folk chumps for two or three decades should comes as no real surprize, to any astute liberal observer or brighter than average consevative. One only has to look at the scorecard of conservative "successes" on the "culture" war front to see that the GOP talks big but always fails to deliver.
Already the principals, especially Kuo's immediate ex-boss Jim Towey, are spinning, spinning, spinning, denying, denying, denying and slandering, slandering, slandering. Kuo is disgruntled former employee, deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives no less, out to settle scores. Some disgruntled ex-employee.
That's not it at all. Kuo is a true believer. He is a true beliver to the extent of a professional wrestling fan who believe all the violence taking place within the squared-circle is real. In an article outlining his growing disgust in how the administration and the Republican Congress unfunded and manipulated the OFBCI for short-term political gain, posted at
BeliefNet.com in 2005, Kuo wrote of our duplicitous president:
I have deep respect, appreciation, and affection for the president. No one who knows him even a tiny bit doubts the sincerity and compassion of his heart(emphasis added). Likewise, the people around the president are good and caring people. I know this firsthand because I experienced it during a health crisis in my own life when their kindness was evident.
President Bush sincere and compassionate? The people around his "good and caring..."? This was two years after Kuo left the agency. In fact he is yet on record as feeling that the president is a sincere, compassionate man surrounded by villainous, incompetent advisors. Like a latter-day
Wat Tyler Kuo wants to set this good man president free to pursue the goal of "Christianizing" the nation. History, though, tells us that
the teenaged King Richard II, after meeting with Tyler, had him treacherously murdered, then repudiated every promise he made to his hapless would-be savior.
The presidental assassins are out after Kuo. But the history of OFBCI is in the books. It has done little or next to nothing to alleviate poverty. Kuo, in the article above, lays much of the blame on Democratic intransigence and the failure of liberal charititable organizations to hold a Republican dominated government accountable and the White House's lack of a minimal commitment to the OFBCI.
Kuo's revelations, from my cursoy reading of his writing and hence his beliefs, are seemingly founded on a New Testament interpetation of the Judeo-Christian Bible; helping the poor and oppressed is the short road to Heaven reading, as opposed to the God-wants-you-to-be-rich vision of the nation's Falwells, Robertsons and Van Impes. Kuo's reading of the New Testament is the one I was taught as a child. But Kuo's indictment of the administration's use of religion to further its political agenda, namely to line the pockets of the the already wealthy, would be stronger if he put away childish things and stopped counting on an invisible friend to bail out the world when it gets in trouble.
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