Rain Storm -- an online journal of opinion and culture

Personally, I've known Pat was either a demented psychopath or a world-class con artist ever since he first emerged on the national scene back in the early 1980s. I remember seeing some old footage of Robertson hopping down the aisle of his "church" on one foot in some kind of a faith-healing trace, and thinking to myself: Nobody does something like that unless they're authentically ripped on the Holy Spirit, or they expect to make some nice coin out of it.

I always assumed it was the latter (a business associate who traveled with Robertson claims he never saw him reading the Bible -- just Investor's Business Daily and the Wall Street Journal.) But then I happened to catch Robertson on the tube giving a speech during the 1988 Republican convention, and I realized he was both a con man and a nut case -- with no clear dividing line between them.

Robertson's speech was devoted not to the evils of the San Francisco Democrats or the disaster that would befall America if Mike Dukakis ever set foot in the White House -- the usual stuff -- but to a full-throated attack on the French Revolution, the Bavarian Illuminati and the international banker's cartel. He sounded like a cross between Robert Anton Wilson and Henry Ford on acid. I haven't heard so many freaking conspiracy theories in one place since my one and only conversation with Larry Flynt, back when he was still hooked on the hard stuff. (I'll tell that story some other time.)

Yesterday I watched as a pretty boy 35ish yuppy political hack from the crowd of sycophants with whom the president has surrounded himself described Hagel (with a sneer) as "someone who has lost his way." He (the yup) went on to say that Hagel has no ideas worth listening to in the matter of the possible resemblance of the Vietnam War to the mess in Iraq. Actually, he said, Hagel no longer knows what the war in Vietnam was about.

Now, consider that. This kid was still crapping in his pants and crying for the pacifier when Hagel and his brother and Hagel's "boys" were fighting to defeat the VC/NVA in the outskirts of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) but he, from the depths of his marvelous intellect knows better what VN was "about."

Meeting briefly with reporters Monday aboard Air Force One, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman subbing for Scott McClellan, said that President Bush believes that those who want the U.S. to begin to change course in Iraq do not want America to win the overall "war on terror." (emphasis mine)

For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.

"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."

What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.

They learn to view every vote as a religious duty, and to consider compromise a sin.

That puts them at the vanguard of a bold effort by evangelical conservatives to mold a new generation of leaders who will answer not to voters, but to God.

[ . . . ]

The philosophy animating Cameron's lecture -- that federal law should be based on biblical precepts -- troubles the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"This nation was founded specifically to avoid the government making religious and theological decisions," Lynn said. "We are not to turn the Holy Scriptures of any group into public policy."

Kennedy counters that evangelicals have every right to put up candidates who vote what they believe to be God's will -- and let voters judge them.

To which Lynn responds, with exasperation: "He says that because he knows in a majority Christian country, the Christian view is going to be expressed by more voters. They have no problem imposing their biblical worldview on every American."

Evangelical conservatives acknowledge that's their goal.

And they now have a systematic plan for achieving it.

A deal perceived by Sunni elites has leading to the destruction of the Iraq state, rammed through an assembly in which Sunnis are almost entirely absent, will have the opposite effect. It could be read, in fact, as a declaration of civil war -- and probably will be so read by Sunni moderates and rejectionists alike.

By blessing such a deal, the Cheney administration will have ripped away the last fig leaf of any claim to support a united, democratic and free Iraq.

In an unprecedented scale of terror attacks, a banned Islamist militant group yesterday simultaneously blasted at least 459 time bombs in 63 of 64 districts across the country.

[ . . . ]

In the leaflets, in Bangla and Arabic, found with the bomb devices, Jama'atul, which was banned on February 23 this year, said: "It is time to implement Islamic law in Bangladesh. There is no future with man-made law."

I got an email the other day and it said, "Cindy if you didn't use so much profanity ... there's people on the fence that get offended.

And you know what I said? "You know what? You know what, god damn it? How in the world is anybody still sitting on that fence?

If you fall on the side that is pro-George and pro-war, you get your ass over to Iraq, and take the place of somebody who wants to come home. And if you fall on the side that is against this war and against George Bush, stand up and speak out.