OT (Iowa, but Repugnants): Hertzberg on Mitt, Huckabee, and God

[MBS]

Hertzberg is always a favorite, and this is one of his better (and funnier) ones

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/01/07/080107taco_talk_hertzberg.

My favorite bits:

Out in Iowa, with the bell at last ringing and the combatants charging out of their corners, the Republican card has come down to the Maulin’ Mormon versus the Battlin’ Baptist. Would the Framers be pleased? Doesn’t seem likely, somehow. . .
Lately, though, Huckabee has been getting his signals mixed, like a man putting letters to his wife and his mistress in the wrong envelopes. A few weeks ago at Liberty University (founder: the late J. Falwell), a student asked him what accounted for his rocketing poll numbers. “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one,” he said. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people—and that’s the only way that our campaign could be doing what it’s doing.” To an evangelical ear, that might sound like simple wonderment. But to many other people it sounded like the ravings of someone who thinks God is his precinct captain. . .
. . . {since} the Party’s firm embrace of “faith” as a mandatory political talking point. It’s no longer clear that the dogmas of whatever sect a candidate happens to be affiliated with can be dismissed as irrelevant to the policies he or she might pursue in office.

. . . . And the dogmas of Mitt Romney’s sect are breathtaking. They include these: that in 1827 a young man named Joseph Smith dug up a set of golden plates covered with indecipherable writing; that, with the help of a pair of magic spectacles, he “translated” the plates from an otherwise unknown language (Reformed Egyptian) into an Olde English that reads like an unfunny parody of the King James Bible; that the Garden of Eden is in Missouri; that American Indians descend from Hebrew immigrants; that Jesus reappeared in pre-Columbian America and converted so many people that the result was a series of archeologically unconfirmable wars in which millions died; that while polygamy had divine approval for most of the nineteenth century, God changed his mind in 1890, just in time for Utah to be allowed into the Union; and that God waited until 1978 to reveal that it was O.K. for blacks to be fully paid-up members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

. .. it is not true that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” as Romney maintained. What freedom, including religious freedom, requires is, precisely, secularism—which is to say, state neutrality in matters of religion. (Nor does religion require freedom, as the European past and the Middle Eastern present demonstrate; religions, plural, do, however.) “Americans do not respect believers of convenience,” Romney thundered in his “faith” speech. “Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world.” These were strange observations, coming as they did from a man whose campaign has consisted largely of jettisoning the beliefs he found convenient as a Massachusetts politician but finds highly inconvenient now that he stands to gain the Republican nomination for President. But then those were merely political beliefs.

Touch gloves, Mitt and Mike. And perhaps, if God interests Himself in the minutiae of earthly politics, He’ll arrange a double knockout.