OK, after that smackdown I applied to Michelle yesterday, I feel I must be fair and give her props for her output today [1]. She quotes John McCandlish Phillips, a former reporter for the New York Times:
I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately — courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in “a theocracy” and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of — hold your breath — a “jihad.”
In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word “frightening” and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.
He goes on from there, pointing at the large number of op-ed bits (some passing as news), which attempt to strike fear against ‘The Christian Right Jihad”
You’d have to be living in a cave someplace to have not noted the full-court press on thisthe last month or two. And I have to wonder if this was not a co-ordinated effort on the part of the left over that period.
I think, however, that their efforts have backfired on them just a bit.
I also have to wonder if the comedy routine the other night from Laura Bush wasn’t a stroke of (unintentional) outright genius. No, I’m not losing my mind… think about this. Consider the reaction she’s getting from some on the right. Consider too, the derision of the leftists and the press (A redundancy). She certainly imparted the idea that the Bushes are not the right-wing monsters the left holds them as… and amazingly enough, they got the left to make that argument FOR them, as they derided the far right for their reaction. Hard to claim the Bushes are Christian Jihadist prudes, after so vocally defending them on that very point over this past few days, eh?
Oh… in the same article, McCandish sounds an interesting note:
The fact is that our founders did not give us a nation frightened by the apparition of the Deity lurking about in our most central places. On Sept. 25, 1789, the text of what was later adopted as the First Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress, and subsequently sent to the states for ratification. On that same day , the gentlemen in the House who had acted to give us that invaluable text took another action: They passed a resolution asking President George Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving to no less a perceived eminence than almighty God.
That’s president , that’s national, that’s official and, alas, my doubting hearties, it’s God — all wrapped up in a federal action by those who knew what they meant by the non-establishment clause and saw their request as standing at not the slightest variance from it. It’s a pity our phalanx of columnists cannot crawl into a time machine to go back and reinstruct them.
Doesn’t stop ’em from trying, though, John.
Update:
Now, I said ‘almost’ coordinated. A lot of this attacking has been driven by the election of a Pope who is (gasp!) Catholic!.
Eternity Road [2] brings an interetsing idea to the table… that the attacks on Christianity are driven by a fear they won’t name.. But Fran does:
The Left’s characteristic rages over conservative ideas are precisely because the calm articulation and defense of those ideas are all it takes to defeat the Left. Whenever it controls the State, it bans the expression of those ideas because it cannot prevail against them on the field of argument. Today, with the world steadily turning away from Leftist convictions and back toward freedom and traditional moral standards, leftists everywhere can see a black cloud hanging over their future. Scant wonder that their annex in the Old Media have loosed all the guns of slander and defamation against Pope Benedict. Despite their still-formidable powers, that one, frail old man with his miter and staff, speaking from his convictions, is enough to defeat them.
And I presume by extention, the whole of Christianity.