For God’s Sake: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES

OP-ED COLUMNIST

For God’s Sake

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 13, 2007

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda is one of the most important stories of the last six years.

In 1981, Gary North, a leader of the Christian Reconstructionist movement — the openly theocratic wing of the Christian right — suggested that the movement could achieve power by stealth. “Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure,” he wrote, “and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

Today, Regent University, founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide “Christian leadership to change the world,” boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration.

Unfortunately for the image of the school, where Mr. Robertson is chancellor and president, the most famous of those graduates is Monica Goodling, a product of the university’s law school. She’s the former top aide to Alberto Gonzales who appears central to the scandal of the fired U.S. attorneys and has declared that she will take the Fifth rather than testify to Congress on the matter.

The infiltration of the federal government by large numbers of people seeking to impose a religious agenda — which is very different from simply being people of faith — is one of the most important stories of the last six years. It’s also a story that tends to go underreported, perhaps because journalists are afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists.

But this conspiracy is no theory. The official platform of the Texas Republican Party pledges to “dispel the myth of the separation of church and state.” And the Texas Republicans now running the country are doing their best to fulfill that pledge. . .

And there’s another thing most reporting fails to convey: the sheer extremism of these people.

You see, Regent isn’t a religious university the way Loyola or Yeshiva are religious universities. It’s run by someone whose first reaction to 9/11 was to brand it God’s punishment for America’s sins. . .

Next week Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at Regent’s Executive Leadership Series.

--MORE--

The Strange Hire of Monica Goodling

While everyone's attention is focused on Monica Goodling's invocation of the Fifth, emails and Executive subornation of an objective process in how the DOJ selects its targets for prosecution, the larger point - Executive appointments, job qualifications and how failing to meet those qualifications lead to mistakes.

For starters, we all know that she went to the hithertofore unheard of Messiah College, which, judging from its website, is on the social conservative frige.

Messiah College

At Messiah College our mission is to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character and Christian faith in preparation for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society.

I guess Monica kinda missed the lofty goals of that statement, but that is pretty much what conservatives do - talk big in order to achieve personal gain.

So anyway, we learn from the Regent U. website that Monica is a 1999 graduate of that law school.

We also know that Regent is operated by nutty social conservative Pat Robertson, and is definitely not imbued with a mainstream curriculum.

Now for the fun part - she goes on to be the DOJ spokeswoman - as a 1999 law graduate. Here's an example of her work, her public face on the Hamdi case:

Scolds Supreme Court

Finally, at the time all hell broke loose, this seven year lawyer (?) was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' senior counsel and White House liaison.

I'm trying to square these appointments with the notion of competent governance. The fevered pronunciations of doom by this administration would dictate that an important slot like this be filled by someone with experience and gravitas, someone of proven competence whose advice could be relied on by the AG - not some inexperienced, weirdly trained neophyte whose law credentials are weak and who was selected in order to toss a banquet of bones to the noisy fringe of the party.

By high bitrate