You'd think that after all these years of demonizing gays and lesbians, goofy weather predictions, the raising of millions of dollars from the hapless viewers of his television programs, the charitably challenged practices of his charities, and an all-purpose never-ending stream of mean-spirited and loopy statements, that at least in presidential election years, Pat Robertson would have been relegated to the outer reaches of Hageeville.

Yet there was Mr. Robertson, on stage with Mitt Romney, the Republican Party's presidential nominee, at a recent rally in Virginia Beach, Virginia. 



Seeing Robertson directly behind Romney's podium - now a little grayer and more stoop shouldered - a few days before the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one couldn't help but flash back on one of his, and the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's, most shameful, divisive and ignominious moments. 



Tomorrow and Saturday I'll be attending the Values Voter Summit, an annual Religious Right confab sponsored by the Family Research Council, American Family Association Action and other groups.

People sometimes ask me what the country would be like if these groups managed to achieve total political power. It isn't necessary to speculate about that. You can see the results of it in several states right now.

Steve Klein has been revealed as a consultant on the Islamophobic film "The Innocence of Muslims." The film has been tied to provoking a backlash that resulted in the assassination of US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other diplomats.

Klein has made at least two appearances on the Denice Gary-Pandol radio show online and also at 1410 AM radio. The radio show is archived at the website of Strategic Solutions for a New Middle East, which is also a sponsor of the program. On the program of 03-31-2012 Klein is described as a United States Marine Corps Officer. The blurb for the program claims that:

"political correctness has undermined the military's rules of engagement, (ROEs), and lead to the deaths of U.S. soldiers.  Find out what the Obama team has done to compromise our military's security, sacrificing the lives of U.S. servicemen and women in order to create a climate of accommodation with the locals in enemy territory, a place where terrorists do not don a military uniform."

Insanity, it has been said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

In light of that, the state of Louisiana might want to get a mental health check-up. Legislators and some education officials there keep promoting creationism in public school science classes - and they keep getting busted on it.

"I'm a college president. If I were at the intellectual level of Michael Moore, this movie would be a dud." -- Dinesh D'Souza

The Scorecard:

The Book: OBAMA'S AMERICA (Regnery, $27.95) is now #5 on The New York Times Combined Print and E-Book Best Sellers (Nonfiction) and #2 on the NYT's Hardcover Nonfiction List.

The Movie: 2016: Obama's America -- #10 at the box office this past week according to boxofficemojo.com, and now #2 on the list of all-time documentary box office (still trailing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by over $90 million).

On Thursday, September 6th, Robert Finn, the bishop who heads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri was convicted by a Jackson County court of one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse.

There is no word yet on whether Bishop Finn will be deemed fit to continue to lead the Catholic Church in Kansas City.

If you were the generous sort, you might call Dinesh D'Souza, the Neil Armstrong of conservative filmmaking, since the controversial longtime Christian conservative political activist and provocateur, has landed where no other conservative making documentary films has ever landed before; on the list of the top ten highest-grossing documentary films in history.

Although D'Souza's thesis about President Obama was eviscerated by Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time on Friday, August 31, a recent Fox News.com headline, "Conservative documentary film 2016: Obama's America poised to surpass Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth," signified that his unabashedly anti-Obama film is having enormous box office success.

Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan attended a fund-raiser in Utah yesterday and was asked about school prayer. His reply was curious.

"That's a constitutional issue of the states, moral responsibility of parents, education," Ryan said.

An international network of conspiracy theorists is pressing their support of the brutal Syrian Assad regime in an alliance with neofascists and authoritarians, including some who peddle antisemitism.

Their attacks on United States foreign policies and criticism of Israeli government policies, fused with their conspiracist mindset, has led them to suggest that the anti-Assad forces are being manipulated as part of a plot to use the “the Syrian crisis to dismantle Hezbollah.”

This is the contention of Franklin P. Lamb, writing on Counterpunch on September 3, 2012 in an article titled “Is the Syrian Crisis Being Leveraged to Weaken Hezbollah?”

The religious leader who founded the Unification Church in 1954 in Seoul, South Korea, and built it into a multibillion-dollar business empire; founded the conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times; and supported and bolstered the religious right in America, has died in South Korea at 92.

Last August, I wrote:

Trying to recap more than 50 years of Moon-ness is like having Tolstoy's War and Peace made into a classic comic book.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah, founder of the Unification Church and funder of various Religious Right political causes, died on Monday.

Moon, who was 92, was familiar to many Americans because of the rather esoteric beliefs of his church - the mass weddings, the flower sellers on the streets and the allegations that the church was really a "cult."

Unless you were listening carefully, you might have missed Mitt Romney's dog whistle to the Christian Right in his speech in Tampa. But stick with me for a few short paragraphs, and you too can learn to hear -- and to deliver -- this year's dog whistle to the Christian Right.

In order to hear it like the dog being whistled to, as I know you would, really all you need to know is that the major Christian Right organizations have a simple and consistent message that has been gaining traction since the release of The Manhattan Declaration in 2009.  The Manhattan Declaration is the premier alliance of conservative evangelical and Catholic leaders. It was principally drafted by Catholic Right strategist, Robert George. They claim more than a half million people have joined with the likes of such original signers as Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.

There are only three-closely related issues for the Christian Right.  Abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom -- in that order.  You might also see such variations on the theme, as life, marriage and religious liberty. But the meaning is essentially the same.  This is not to say that other issues are unimportant, but to say that these are the most important, and they are always stated in this way, in this order.

For example, the Family Research Council has jointly sponsored the Values Bus with the Heritage Foundation encouraging conservative voter participation. Their slogan -- in banners painted on the side of the bus: Your Money, Your Values, Your Vote. Heritage is mostly about the Money part. And FRC Action's stated agenda is:  "Defending Life, Marriage and Religious Liberty."   The Values Bus, BTW, will be in Charlotte during the Democratic Convention but, probably wisely, not at the convention itself.