Well said Bob.

Back to Kuo's book, here's an excerpt about supposed non-political "roundtable events" organized by the White House and paid for by the taxpayers, and how they were distorted and used by the politicians:

[During a similar event the next year in Atlanta] Ralph Reed surveyed the enormous ballroom with wide eyes. He looked back at me. "Do you realize what you've done here? Do you realize what this is? This is what Republicans have been trying to do for the last 20 years. For the last 20 years we've tried to find a way to get this kind of an audience into a room. "

Ralph knew why I invited him. He pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number and exclaimed, "Karl, I'm down here in Atlanta at the faith-based conference. You've won't believe what we've got here. You've got 3,000 people, mostly minorities, applauding a stinkin' video of the president. This is unbelievable. THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE!!"

More than a dozen conferences with more than 20,000 faith and community leaders were held in 2003 and 2004 in every significant battleground state, including two in Florida, one in Miami ten days before the 2004 election. Their political power was incalculable. They were completely off the media's radar screen.

Kuo's last day at the White House, after serious health issues had forced him to re-examine his life:

One day in December I turned in my badge and on my way out did the usual and customary thing and delivered my resignation letter to Andy Card. He accepted it, shook my hand, thanked me for all I'd done, wished me well on my future and health, and asked me if I had any thoughts on how the White House could improve. I had been through too much not to say something. I told him everything I thought. The president had made great promises but they hadn't been delivered on. Worse than that, the White House hadn't tried. Worse than that, we had used people of faith to further our political agenda and hadn't given them anything in return. I went on and on for a few minutes. He sat there a bit bug eyed. "Formality meetings" are supposed to be just that.

"And finally sir, this thought. I don't know if you are aware of this but your staff frequently refers to the faith-based initiative as the '****** faith based initiative.' That doesn't help."

He shook my hand, assured me that he would look into it and that the president was committed to the initiative. I was being spun. I was already an outsider.

Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD!

As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN, card to brighten up their dark, sad, little world.

Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.


ACLU
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York, NY 10004

Don't you ever get tired of lying? Doesn't it just wear you down after a while?

This thread is about the Bush admin's betrayal of their Christian supporters, as reported by a prominent Christian conservative and former Bush admin official.

Why don't you just do the usual and viciously attack him for telling the truth?

E.J. Dionne in today's Washington Post:

A Faith-Based Battle for Voters

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006; A21

The very fact that it took David Kuo's book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction," to put President Bush's faith-based initiative back into the news proves that the author's thesis is right.

His argument -- Kuo went on the record with it long before this book appeared -- is that the White House never put much money or muscle behind Bush's "compassionate conservatism." It used the faith-based agenda for political purposes and always made tax cuts for the wealthy a much higher priority than any assistance to those "armies of compassion" that Bush evoked so eloquently.

As a result, the faith-based initiative has largely been off the public radar for years. And after Sept. 11, 2001, the president made the war on terrorism his central cause, both for substantive reasons and because (until now, at least) it proved to be a great vehicle for winning crossover votes. Compassionate conservatism gave way to martial conservatism.

The headlines that have come Kuo's way have focused on the author's claims that White House staffers ridiculed some of their evangelical supporters as "nuts" and "goofy" and that public events surrounding Bush's faith-based initiative were geared toward Republican electoral fortunes. As a former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Kuo has a fair claim to knowing what he's talking about.

Exposés of hypocrisy are the mother's milk of Washington journalism. Yet the most useful thing that could flow from Kuo's revelations would not be a splashy exchange of charges and countercharges but rather a quiet reappraisal by rank-and-file evangelicals of their approach to politics.

I hope Kuo's book promotes serious discussions in religious study groups around the country about whether the evangelicals' alliance with political conservatism has actually made the world, well, more godly from their own point of view. What are evangelicals actually getting out of this partnership? Are they mostly being used by a coalition that, when the deals are cut, cares far more about protecting the interests of its wealthy and corporate supporters than its churchgoing foot soldiers?

Kuo is being cut up by some administration loyalists. That's not surprising, but it's painful for me. I met Kuo in the 1990s through a conservative friend and was impressed by the power of his religious faith and his passion for developing a conservative approach to helping the poor that would be as serious as liberal efforts but, in his view, more effective.

The faith-based initiative was one of the few Bush policies I defended against liberal attacks during the administration's early months -- before I concluded that it was not really an administration priority. Kuo and I are both friends of John DiIulio, who briefly headed the faith-based office and brought Kuo in. DiIulio and I collaborated on research into religiously inspired social service work in the 1990s.

All of which is to say that I once hoped -- and, for the future, still hope -- that left and right might meet in some compassionate center to offer support for expanded government help to the needy while also fostering the indispensable work of religious and community groups.

Kuo has always thought that nongovernmental groups could carry a larger share of the load in fighting poverty than I do. Kuo, you see, really is a conservative, although he does acknowledge that not all past efforts by government to help the poor are failures.

Despite our disagreements, I have always shared Kuo's view that liberals who care about the poor should be less squeamish about building stronger alliances between government and religiously based social action work. Government can do things the religious and community groups can't, but the religious and community groups can do things government can't.

Kuo's book comes on the eve of an election in which the odds suggest that voters will administer a strong rebuke to Republicans and the administration. It will thus be read as another argument for why such a reproach is merited.

But the power of his case should be felt after the election. Kuo suggested on "60 Minutes" that evangelical Christians take "a fast from politics." Personally, I don't favor "fasts" from political participation, even if the one Kuo proposes might help the sort of candidates I support. Instead, I hope Kuo's reflections will encourage a less rigidly partisan approach to the role of religious faith in our public life.

When Kuo says there's something wrong with "taking Jesus and reducing him to some precinct captain, to some get-out-the-vote guy," he sounds a trumpet that makes you want to follow him into the battle.

Excellent post Rodeo. An obviously unbiased editorial from the bastion of keeping it balanced, the Washington Post.

Excellent substantive post there yourself, bucko.

Did you even read the Dionne piece? Did you read any of what Chu has written?

Do you have any reaction to the fact that Bush has played the Christian base for complete fools?

Is there ANY newspaper that someone doesn't claim is "biased"?

It has always impressed me as "bias" is based on whether the specific source defends or attacks your specific stand. And the same news source can defend one day and find something to disagree with tomorrow. Does that make them "biased" in one instance and "supportive" in the other?

The funny thing is, had Rick bothered to read the Dionne piece, he would have seen that Dionne is a supporter of Bush's faith-based policies, and broke with his liberal friends over the issue.