Mitt Romney for President?

One of the reasons Sullivan might have printed my little post was that he was grappling with the same issues in his review of the Dinesh D'Sousa book in The New Republic .

I will be reading the D'Sousa book at around the same time I am reading Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so I have to take Sullivan's word for the description of the book.

Basically, the book says that fundamental Islam is not terrorism. It's not even bad, since it promotes a desirable social order (woman and homosexuals and Jews in their place). No pornography, no personal freedom, no thoughts that there might be personal freedom, or some play in the joints of the power structure where you might exercise personal freedom away from a moral code which -- surprise on surprise -- Dinesh D'Sousa gets to make up himself. But it looks an awful lot like Radical Islam (as D'Sousa invents it).

Apparently, D’Sousa says that blowing up buildings in New York in response to freedom is not terrorism. It is a more than reasonable reaction to American liberalism. Therefore, American Liberalism in and of itself blew up the World Trade Center. Therefore, according to D'Sousa, the United States may be on the wrong side of its own war. The United States should be helping Osama to root out American-style liberalism.

Essentially, according to Sullivan, D'Sousa wants a theocracy, but D'Sousa isn't even interested in theocracy as a means of enforcing even his own theories of the sacred. D'Sousa is just looking for the power of people like "him" to have control over people like "us."

Sounds to me, and its been sounding this way for a couple of years now, ever since, in my intellectual development at least, I was jumping up and down about Terri Schiavo:

The Republican Party, the Conservative movement, is slowly being dominated by a sort of nostalgia for pre-Reformation, pre-Lutheran Protestantism in the United States.

They are looking for a Protestantism that never was, mixed with a sort of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism. There would be no Pope, so it can be observed by Protestants. Then they want to use the power of the New Deal/ Fair Deal state to ram this new religion down everyone's throats. The head of the government would be the only person with the power to be the head of the church.

Some proof of the fact that this concoction is new is that there was no law for these people to turn to when they were making up rules for Terri Schiavo, and there is no law for these people to turn to when they try to get Scooter Libby off for perjury. And there is no law for Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales to turn to when they are trying to claim voter fraud based on the fact that black citizens turn up to vote. These people hate judges, even conservative Republican judges, because even the most conservative Judge will look to the law to justify an exercise of power. These people want the judges to exercise “Higher Law” as they see it.

It is true that traditionally, it has been liberals -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Martin Luther King, Jr. -- who have tended to claim “Higher Law”, especially in the area of civil rights. Conservatives have long been outraged -- calling these people Massachusetts liberals (Emerson, Thoreau, Sumner) and anarchists (Joe Hill) and Communists (Martin Luther King, Jr.) who did not understand the nature of the rule of law and the Constitution.

Turns out the Conservatives were never outraged over appeals to “Higher Law.” They were just waiting to overturn the Government that defeated their ancestors in war, freed their slaves, and then, 100 years later, gave their slave’s ancestors some of the rights of human beings.

In today's lead editorial, The New York Times
(obviously not objective, but not necessarily wrong), claimed that U.S. Attorneys are being fired, basically for allowing the descendents of these slaves, the right to vote in accordance with the law.

These Republican John Ashcroft-appointed U.S. Attorneys had the audacity to actually take their jobs seriously.

They didn’t understand the role of law in the new America.

Now, these new conservatives are beginning to wrap themselves in a religion that never existed to claim this is what God wanted for them all along.

Why shouldn’t a Mormon be our next President?