{"id":7153,"date":"2017-12-11T17:16:43","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T22:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=7153"},"modified":"2017-12-11T17:16:43","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T22:16:43","slug":"you-cant-fool-us-evangelicals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=7153","title":{"rendered":"You can’t fool us, evangelicals"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille; if it fails, they will devour it.”<\/b><\/p>\n

H.L. Mencken<\/p>\n

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Well.<\/p>\n

Scarcely more than a year ag<\/a>o, I pointed toward a sort of bright side arising out of Donald Trump’s election: The Evangelical Right would crash and burn.<\/p>\n

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Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?!<\/i> Yep, they did \u2014 and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and \u2018movement so-called conservatism\u2019 committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory — but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now that ‘evangelical’ is practically a dirty-word and Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell, Jr., are figures of (overdue) public ridicule …. permit me a moment of schadenfreude<\/i>. I’ve earned it.<\/p>\n

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“The free exercise clause of the constitution does not apply to any religion but Christianity.”<\/b><\/p>\n

Roy Moore<\/p>\n

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We know what you are now, evangelicals — and you’re finished. For years you have preened about your ‘family values’ — and you broke for Trump with record-setting numbers. You prattle about love-love-love — and you back men who are egregious racists, xenophobes, and amoral horndogs. You can barely open your mouths without lying, and in Roy Moore you’re backing a theocratic loony who is, in fact, deeply hostile to the Enlightenment ideals that undergird America’s founding.<\/p>\n

We know who you are, evangelicals: You are the screwed-up people who actually are as sick and decadent as Christianity says everybody is; your bullshit theology is nothing but projection.<\/p>\n

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The polls range all over the place. A FOX News poll shows Jones ahead by 10-points, and another set of polls sampled at the same time puts Moore ahead by 3-points. The bottom-line, probably, is that it’s too close to call.<\/p>\n

I have a simple rule that I invoke whenever a political issue is in doubt, and I can count on one hand the number of times it has gone wrong: Never go long against the common sense and decency of the American people. Trump and Moore are w-a-a-a-y long, ambulatory affronts to common sense and ordinary decency, and it’s time for a market correction — so I’m calling tomorrow’s contest for Jones, by a nose. Yes, it’s Alabama, and you can hardly go out-of-doors without tripping over some idiot Baptist trying to jam a tract in your hand, and Moore got re-elected to the state Supreme Court after removal for egregious misconduct that should have doomed him to obscurity. Those things count strongly in his favor; he has a devoted base, and they will turn out tomorrow.<\/p>\n

But so will the sane, decent-minded grown-ups, and they’re not going to stand for further humiliation at the hands of this pack of clowns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The job before democracy is to get rid of such canaille; if it fails, they will devour it.” H.L. Mencken Well. Scarcely more than a year ago, I pointed toward a sort of bright side arising out of Donald Trump’s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7153"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7153"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7163,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7153\/revisions\/7163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}