Saturday, August 20, 2005
An Eye for an Eye
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who increasingly seems to be floundering in his attempts to position himself to run for president in 2008, apparently doesn't realize that Christian fundamentalists neither forgive nor forget.
His video diagnosis of Terry Schiavo already forgotten, Frist lost the support of hardcore right-wingers recently when he came out in support of embryonic stem cell research. As a result, he was judged not pure enough to rail against activist judges with Tom Delay and James Dobson at Justice Sunday II last weekend.
Apparently, no one has had the heart to tell Frist the game is up. In an attempt to woo the base back to his side, The Harvard M.D. told a Rotary Club meeting in Nashville yesterday he favors exposing children to both evolution and intelligent design
"I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future," says the clueless Frist.
The back-to-the-future Christian right -- in a its headlong rush to embrace Old Testament family values -- is no longer moved by quaint notions of Christian forgiveness. Turn the other cheek is out. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth is in.
Frist and his fellow country-club Republicans thought they'd discovered a clever strategy to herd large numbers of yokels into the voting booth to pull the levers for corporate conservatives. Now they are beginning to perceive -- perhaps only dimly -- that they are merely the dog being waved by the tail.
Will somebody please call Frist and tell him that he can go to a zillion NASCAR races. He can pander. He can surrender anything that's left of his dignity, his reputation, his soul -- but it will never be enough for the Christian fundamentalists in the Republican base. He crossed them once on stem cells. They will never trust him again, and for that reason, he will never be elected president.
His video diagnosis of Terry Schiavo already forgotten, Frist lost the support of hardcore right-wingers recently when he came out in support of embryonic stem cell research. As a result, he was judged not pure enough to rail against activist judges with Tom Delay and James Dobson at Justice Sunday II last weekend.
Apparently, no one has had the heart to tell Frist the game is up. In an attempt to woo the base back to his side, The Harvard M.D. told a Rotary Club meeting in Nashville yesterday he favors exposing children to both evolution and intelligent design
"I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future," says the clueless Frist.
The back-to-the-future Christian right -- in a its headlong rush to embrace Old Testament family values -- is no longer moved by quaint notions of Christian forgiveness. Turn the other cheek is out. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth is in.
Frist and his fellow country-club Republicans thought they'd discovered a clever strategy to herd large numbers of yokels into the voting booth to pull the levers for corporate conservatives. Now they are beginning to perceive -- perhaps only dimly -- that they are merely the dog being waved by the tail.
Will somebody please call Frist and tell him that he can go to a zillion NASCAR races. He can pander. He can surrender anything that's left of his dignity, his reputation, his soul -- but it will never be enough for the Christian fundamentalists in the Republican base. He crossed them once on stem cells. They will never trust him again, and for that reason, he will never be elected president.
